


Stay Alive

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Pregnancy, Suicidal Thoughts, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-08 04:54:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 51,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8831212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: Post-3x09, Frank wrestles with his demons, and Laurel with her ghosts.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the song of the same name by Jose Gonzalez. Basically an angsty version of Stay Blue, with a litany of other changes from season 3. Normally I have fics planned and/or written before I publish, but I wanted to get this one out before 3b, so I’m kinda throwing caution to the wind here by publishing and I can’t really guarantee regular updates since this first chap is all I have written right now. I don't even really have the rest planned and probably shouldn't be publishing but... eh. 
> 
> This... is not happy. Pretty much none of this will be happy. Just a forewarning, if you were expecting a happy fluffy season 3 Stay Blue redux. That this is not.
> 
> Enjoy, regardless!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playlist for this fic is [here](http://8tracks.com/aghamora1/nox-aurumque#).

They stop him outside the door before they let him see her.

“Just… be aware that she can’t speak,” a med student, with kind brown eyes and natural hair, tells him, voice low and firm. There’re tears in her eyes, like she’s been crying, and if Frank weren’t about to collapse from exhaustion he thinks he might wonder why. “She was intubated for hours, and the smoke inhalation she sustained before that did a number on her vocal cords. She’s been communicating with us by writing on a pad of paper.” The girl pauses, lips pressed into a thin, tight line. “We had to sedate her, earlier. She was hysterical. If she seems out of it that’s why.”

“Got it,” is all he manages to choke out, and tries to step past her – and inexplicably, she steps in his way, immovable as a mountain.

“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t upset her. She’s not…” She drifts off, sucking in a breath. “This is off the record, not my professional opinion, but she’s not okay.”

His chest tightens. “They said she was stable.”

“She is stable,” she tells him, grimly. “That’s not the kind of okay I mean.”

She leaves him, with that, and he listens to the squeaking of her tennis shoes on the checkered linoleum until the sound has faded into the distance, around the corner. It’s only then that he turns, and slowly, timidly, reaches for the doorknob, twisting it open to let himself in.

She’s stable. She’s going to be okay.

And she asked for him.

He doesn’t know what he expects to find inside, really. Nothing feels real, anymore; the world around him is blurred, greyscale, every shape distorted, like a lucid dream or a nightmare or hallucination, or a combination of all three. He can still taste the ashes in his mouth from the fire, feel them coating his skin, faintly.

He isn’t sure how many hours have passed since he arrived here, following Laurel with his heart in his throat, shaken to the bone, sitting in a cold plastic chair in the waiting room and trembling and reciting prayers he could only half-remember, to a God he was sure hadn’t given a shit. It all comes back to him at once, when he reaches for the doorknob. Like an electric shock straight to his brainstem.

The fire. Wes. Wes was in the house. Laurel was, too. Wes is dead.

Laurel is pregnant.

The thought makes his stomach clench and heart clamp up in tandem, clench and contract and come damn close to killing him. He can’t think about that. That doesn’t matter right now.

It _does_. He doesn’t know how it’ll ever stop mattering.

He can’t see her, at first. Has to round a corner before she comes into view, a speck of muted color in the otherwise blindingly white, sterile hospital room, and the moment he sees her he feels his knees weaken, lungs fill with something impossibly heavy. He’s never seen her look anything like this, even at her worst. She’s filthy, grey, covered with ashes. But that isn’t what he means.

It’s the look in her eyes; empty, like they’re open and she’s breathing but she’s not conscious, not even close, or cognizant of anything around her. She’s sitting up, fingering her hospital bracelet idly. She doesn’t react to him entering, as if she’s barely heard him, and she looks so small underneath the sheets, small as a child but too broken and world-weary to look very childlike at all. She just keeps staring, straight ahead at some spot on the wall, and it’s a vacant, unnerving stare, and in the ashes on her face he thinks he can see the tracks of her tears where it had been washed off, washed clean by them. She has an IV in her wrist. Bandages on her right arm, and he remembers what Bonnie had told him when he’d gotten here: third-degree burns, over nine percent of her body. Her arm and leg. But the burns aren’t what has done this to her. Burns can heal.

This look in her eyes isn’t the kind of thing that can.

He barely recognizes her. He doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say, no words that feel adequate to fill this silence, the huge gaping space between them, and Laurel still isn’t looking at him; he might as well not be there at all. She just fingers her bracelet. Stares, and stares more. He aches, all over, aches to go to her but he knows he can’t, knows she doesn’t trust him anymore, probably figures she barely _knows_ him anymore and he wouldn’t blame her for that. He’s standing there but he may as well be a thousand miles way, in another dimension entirely, watching himself from the outside. He’s not him, anymore. Not Frank. She’s not her, either.

He doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t have the faintest fucking clue. How is he ever supposed to speak again. Breathe again. _Move_ again.

Somehow he makes himself do all three anyway.

“Hey,” is all he can muster up, and finally Laurel drags her eyes up to look at him like they’re the heaviest weights in the world.

And she does. She looks at him.

His heart gives out inside him, for the hundredth time, locks up and short-circuits, sparks shooting everywhere under his breastbone, before kicking itself back into motion as she looks at him, her once sharp blue-grey eyes bleary, unfocused, dull, like all the color has been leeched out of them. It’s probably the painkillers but something is telling him it isn’t, and she’s looking at him like a stranger; blinking once, twice, slowly.

Silent. Terrifyingly calm. She doesn’t flinch, or cry, or give any reaction to his presence at all. She just stares. Keeps staring.

Frank can’t decide if that’s better or worse.

But she looks away, after a moment, back down to her hands. Frank takes that as his cue to approach, and so he does, sinking down into the chair at her bedside, taking in the room around them, the sight of the four walls that suddenly seem too small to contain them, contain everything he’s feeling, the terror and horror and sickness in his gut. His heart is hammering like it’s liable to bend his ribcage back and burst out of his chest, bloody and aching. He thinks about asking her how she’s feeling, but decides quickly that’s fucking stupid; he knows how she’s feeling. He waits for her to say something, take the lead, then remembers she can’t. Won’t.

He spots a pad of paper on her bedside table, on top of it a pen, and swallows thickly, nodding at it.

“You want that, or…?”

Laurel looks at him, but doesn’t give an answer, just a slow, mute blink, eyelids closing then peeling back, almost mechanically. Not a nod. No nothing.

Okay. That’s okay. Nothing is okay. But _she’s_ okay, and that’s all that matters. She’s alive.

Only she’s not. He may be dumb, but he’s not dumb enough to kid himself into believing that. He’s not sure what this is, this state she’s in, but he’s not sure he can call it _alive_.

He takes that as a no, and nods, folding his hands, rubbing the calloused palms together, fidgeting beneath her gaze. “Uh, okay. Yeah.”

More silence, piling on them in layers, thick as a layer of humidity in the air before a storm. Clogging his lungs and forcing its way down his throat, filling up the chasm of his chest, expanding. He can’t breathe, looking at her, and isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to again. Everything is fucked. So fucked, and ruined beyond any semblance of repair, ever.

Everything is different, now. This is only the beginning.

“I was worried,” he blurts out, dumbly, desperate to end the silence, flailing, knowing he has to be the one to do it. He shakes his head, lowering his eyes but feeling hers on him, watching him closely. “I… Bon told me you were here. She didn’t know if you were… gonna be okay, or-” Something cuts him off, a heavy weight welling in his throat. “I was so scared, Laurel, I-”

She reaches her hand out, finally; the unbandaged one, gesturing at her bedside table, where the pad of paper rests, and a potent mixture of fear and relief pounds through him, to see her move, give some sign of life, of sentience. A sign that she’s still in there, somewhere, able to be reached. There’s a determination about her suddenly, something switching on in her eyes, behind all the blankness, in that void of blue and grey and black swirling together like a watercolor. He obliges hastily, clicking the pen and passing that to her as well, and for a moment she refocuses her attention on the paper, pen scraping the surface with quick, clumsy strokes, unaccustomed to writing with her left hand as she is.

Finally, she holds it out to him. And he takes it.

> _Was it you?_

He freezes, looking back up at her and finding her still staring, but now it’s an accusatory stare; a furious one. He thinks he can see her trembling with rage, and he doesn’t know quite what she means, what _it_ refers to, but he senses he has to ameliorate the situation regardless. And he remembers, suddenly, something else Bonnie had told him.

Wes. Wes had been dead before the fire.

Someone had killed him and then, then he knows what _it_ means.

“I didn’t-” He shakes his head, desperate to make her believe him. “I didn’t, Laurel, you know I’d never do that.”

_Do I?_

She doesn’t have to write the words down; he can see them in her eyes. Why should she believe him? After his blood-soaked pilgrimage back to Annalise? Why should she assume this was anyone _other_ than him?

He keeps going, leaning towards her. “I know… I know you got no reason to believe me. But it wasn’t me, I swear, I…” His voice catches. He lowers his eyes. “I’d never do that to you. Annalise texted me, that night. Told me to come to the house. I was just pullin’ up when I saw the explosion happen, I-” He stops, abruptly, lowering his voice, knowing his actions that night now don’t matter to her. Nothing does, and trying to persuade her of his innocence right now seems almost to trivialize her pain, her loss, the hurt he can feel radiating off of her. “I didn’t do this. I swear I didn’t.”

He doesn’t know if she believes him or not. She’s still just looking at him, appraising him wordlessly. Looking at him with those eyes of hers that can cut away all his outer layers, peel them back and take him apart and see him for what he really is. It’s an unsettling sort of stare, one she’s always had, and it makes him fidget but he holds her gaze, bares himself to her. Lets her look close, deep inside him, to know that he’s not lying.

Laurel doesn’t write anything down, after. They lapse into silence again, and after a while the elephant in the room comes stomping unceremoniously back into Frank’s mind. The baby. He doesn’t know if the baby is even still alive, if it’d been lost to the trauma of the explosion, too small and fragile to survive inside her. He knows it isn’t his. Most likely it’s Wes’s. He hadn’t cared to ask if Bonnie knew; he’d only wanted to know if she was all right, and he tries to choke down the words but suddenly they’re all he can think, all-consuming.

“Bonnie, uh, she told me…” He shakes his head, looking at her cautiously, unable to say the word aloud. He can’t, for some reason, even though it shouldn’t matter to him, so he doesn’t, just asks, “Is it his?”

No answer. Just a stare, which she breaks quickly, lowering her eyes. And he has his answer there.

She’s writing, again, suddenly. She flips the pad of paper around when she’s done, holding it out to him again.

> _Do you know who it was?_

He blinks. She doesn’t seem to care about the baby – at least not right now, and not about discussing it with him because it sure as hell does not concern him in the slightest. Even in spite of whatever they were before, that fragile almost-love they’d had that doesn’t matter now, that is but a distant gauzy memory. He doesn’t know what they are to each other now. Probably nothing – and this isn’t about him. The existence of this baby shouldn’t matter to him. He shouldn’t care.

He does. Can’t stop.

Frank shakes the thoughts away with a shake of his head, troubled. “No.”

It’s all he can give her, even if she doesn’t seem satisfied with it. He doesn’t know. For once in his damn life he wasn’t involved in whatever happened. He has a sense already though, somehow, that he’s _going_ to get involved. Because of her. Because Laurel wants answers, wants revenge, and he can see in her eyes that she isn’t going to back down. Come hell or high water she’s going to get what she wants, and hell and high water have already come for them, a thousand times over.

And he doesn’t know what comes next, after this. If he tries to imagine it, tries to do anything other than exist in this moment with her, he thinks he’ll go crazy.

Silence, again. Stillness. Everything here is so still, disturbingly still. It feels wrong even to breathe. He thinks of what to say. Something about how worried he’d been. How much he’d missed her – but all he’d be doing is talking about himself, and he doesn’t get to do that, not now. Never again. This isn’t about him, his feelings, his _anything_.

“I’m gonna find out who it was,” he promises, without thinking. He lowers his voice, trying to get her to look him in the eyes. “Okay? I promise.”

Something breaks in her, then. Ruptures deep, like a crack in the earth splitting through her chest, splitting _all_ of her open. All the air goes out of her in a gust and she folds inward on herself, and emptiness becomes sorrow, so much hurt he can feel it like it’s his own. He’s always been able to do that somehow, feel what she’s feeling. Clairsentience. And she’s hurting so badly, now. Hurting in a way that flows through her veins, sustains her like her heartbeat.

He doesn’t know how to make it stop. How to reach her. He doesn’t think he ever can.

Her eyes mist over with tears, shoulders quaking with silent sobs. She can’t cry. Wail. Howl. Scream her grief loud enough for the world to hear. All she can do is break silently, here in this little room, with only him to see, only him to know her pain, her suffering. All at once his own pain seems like nothing – nothing at all compared to hers; an inconsequential little drop in the ocean of hers.

“Laurel…”

All he can do is say her name, dumbly. Stupidly. He’s so fucking stupid and he always has been, and he thinks about reaching out to her but knows he can’t, doesn’t know _what_ to do. Wes is dead. Gone. She’s pregnant with the child of a dead man. The world feels tilted on its axis, all wrong. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s nothing he _can_ do.

Except offer her the comfort of his presence, meager as it may be. He’d done that, once, a lifetime ago; offered to stand beside her, comfort her that way. And he’ll do it again, if she’ll have him. If she wants him.

She’s seething with rage, fury, eyes smoldering like wet embers. She’s sniffling too, making soft hoarse, airy sounds that aren’t words or sobs, and he doesn’t know _what_ they are. He tries to reach out, thoughtlessly, but she bats him away, cold, refusing to meet his eyes. He wants to tell her it’s okay, to cry in front of him, to break, but he senses somehow she doesn’t want to hear it.

She doesn’t want his words. Frank doesn’t know how he knows, just that he does. He doesn’t know what it is that she wants at all and so he stays silent. Still.

Then, without warning, she reaches for the notepad again.

Frank almost cranes his neck to see what she’s writing but stops himself. Whatever it is she’s writing furiously, jaw clenched, eyes burning, with sharp strokes of her pen, longer than the terse questions she’d written before. Then, finally, Laurel thrusts it out at him, indignant, swiping the tears on her cheeks away as if to hide them from view. There’s anger in her eyes – but not just anger. It’s darker than that. _Hate_.

Frank goes still, when he reads the words she’s scrawled. Very very still.

Still as death.

> _It should’ve been you._

Four simple words. Simple as anything, written as if in a child’s handwriting – simple, and destructive, painful as a million lashes on his back. It should’ve been him, and he knows what she means perfectly well. _Him_ , murdered in that house. _Him_ , left to burn to a crisp. _His_ body, growing cold in the morgue on some metal slat. He knows who he is, what he’s done. The lives he’s taken with these hands. Wes hadn’t deserved that, that cold and brutal and untimely death. He hadn’t deserved to burn.

He would’ve. Should’ve. It _should’ve_ been him and stupidly, irrationally, in that moment Frank wishes it had been, if it would ease even a little of her pain now.

“Laurel…”

Her name is all he can say, again; hoarse, broken. He feels like the worst piece of shit in the world, right then. He doesn’t deserve to be here, still living, drawing breath, not even remotely. He should’ve died a long time ago. Should’ve pulled that trigger when Annalise told him to, taken that out he was given, and all at once those feelings boil in his brain again: wanting to die. End it all. Make things right. It’s the last good thing he can do – die and leave everyone be, for good.

But no. No, not now that Laurel is here. Even if she hates him, and he knows she does. Even if she never says a word to him again, hates him forever. He can’t die. He has to stay with her. Even if it’s only from a distance, only watching her, never allowed into her life again. He has to exist in this same universe as her. He can’t stop. It’s stupid, irrational again. It doesn’t make any sense.

He doesn’t have a lot to live for. But he is living. He no longer wants to die.

He doesn’t think he can say the same for her, though.

The words scald, chew at his insides like acid as his eyes trace the imprints of her blue pen on the paper. She’s always known how to get to him, how to fire precisely the right ammo to tear him apart, and she does it right then, even silent and wordless as she is. Dismantles and destroys him with her simple, flat gaze, those even simpler words. There’s nothing he can do with them. He just stares, same as her, and he can feel her watching him, skittish as a doe, but no fear in her gaze.

She’s not afraid of him. No, it’s worse than that.

She _hates_ him.

Hates him for everything. For leaving. But most of all she hates him because it wasn’t him, because Wes died instead of him and she’d chosen Wes, loved Wes. Wanted Wes. And she got him instead. Some poor fucking excuse for a stand-in.

A moment passes, and then, all at once she’s opening her mouth, half-whispering something, but it comes out as an unintelligible croak, barely a sound at all. Frank doesn’t hear, and frowns, leaning in closer, listening to her try to speak, and once he’s close enough-

“Get out.”

His heart seizes up inside him. He’d seen the words coming. She doesn’t want him here. The only person she wants with her can’t be here, ever again, and he doesn’t blame her for not wanting to look at him; most days he can’t stand to either. But still he tenses, hurt flooding his eyes.

“Please… Laurel, don’t-”

One syllable is all he gets, this time. One measly syllable that’s barely even that.

“ _Go_.”

They said she couldn’t speak but somehow she’s mustered her voice regardless. To tell him to go. She hates him, and he knows it then, and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse than her feeling nothing at all.

She’s still seething, trembling with rage, like a pressurized steam pipe ready to burst, eyes like simmering lakes of lava. Those same eyes are red-rimmed, surrounded by broken blood vessels from crying, and the sounds she’s making with her tears don’t sound like any he’s ever heard before. They sound like gasps. Like she’s heaving, struggling for each inhale and exhale, lungs burning, scalded by the smoke. She hates him.

 _It should’ve been you_ , and she’s right. She’s always right.

Frank rises to stand, numbly, and makes his way over to the door. He could ask her to stay, beg her to; he’s terrified to leave her alone in this state. But she wants him gone, out of her sight, and that’s all he can do for her now. All there’s left to do. So he does it.

He leaves her, and he loves her so fiercely he’s sick with it, and hates himself more than she ever could.

 

~

 

Weeks pass.

He doesn’t hear from her, not that he expects to. Bonnie keeps him abreast of the situation at the hospital, because for some reason Laurel has let her stay, even though as far as he knows Laurel has never liked Bonnie much. She’s undergoing surgeries. Skin grafts, for her arm. The burns on her leg had been less severe, only second-degree. She’s in a lot of pain, Bonnie tells him. Will probably be in a lot of pain for a long, long time.

Weeks pass with nothing. Nothing but waiting, holed up in a dingy motel room in the city with only the demon of his mind for company, and occasionally Bonnie. Doing whatever he can to help her fight the charges against Annalise, who the DA had refused to let out on bail. Hunting, in his spare time, for answers about that night, answers for Laurel. It’s the only thing he can do for her, now: get the answers she seeks. The ones he’d promised her.

And then, finally, one grey Sunday morning in mid-November, he gets a call.

Michaela’s name lights up his screen, and he’s immediately suspicious; Prom Queen likes him just about as much as he likes her – which is not at all. Not even a little. But he knows she’s been with Laurel at the hospital often, according to Bonnie, so he hits accept and raises it to his ear, frowning.

“Pratt?”

A pause. He can practically feel Michaela rolling her eyes on the other end. “Hello to you too.”

“What’s goin’ on?” Another pause, longer this time. He gulps. “You with Laurel? She okay?”

“She’s fine. That’s… why I’m calling, actually.” She sighs. “She’s being released today. She asked for you.”

His breath catches. “She did?”

“Yes. And I don’t know _why_ ,” she says, tone disapproving. “But she did. So get down here. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

She hangs up, with a faint _click_. And that’s all he gets.

But it’s all he needs, and Frank all but flies to his feet, dressing in jeans and a t-shirt and his leather jacket and doing a quick once-over of himself in the mirror. He’s been surviving, these past few weeks, in some state of suspended animation – but only barely, and it’s evidenced by the lines on his face, bags under his eyes, the stubble growing on his chin he hasn’t bothered to shave, the hair thickening on his head. He splashes cold water on his face a few times, running his hands over it before heading out the door, and speeding to the hospital.

She’s okay. She is.

And she asked for him.

He isn’t inclined to believe she doesn’t hate him, still, because he’s sure she does. She must. He’d had nightmares for days about her words, _It should’ve been you_ , nightmares about burning alive to please her, to make her happy. Pulling the trigger for Annalise. For Laurel. For them both. Sometimes he still does. And she hates him. And she asked for him.

He has no fucking idea why. Probably he never will.

Michaela is in the lobby like she’d said she would be, and spares him only a cursory glance when he steps inside past the revolving door, turning immediately, beckoning him to follow. He does, quickening his pace to keep up, bombarding her with questions immediately.

“How’s she been?” he asks, hurriedly, as they zip by a nurse pushing a cart, down an interminably long white hallway. “Better, or-”

“The same,” Michaela deadpans, not looking at him. “More or less.”

“Bonnie said she’s still not talking. That true?”

Michaela looks troubled, and nods. “Not a word. The doctor’s are sure by now she can. But she won’t.”

They walk on in tense silence, for a moment, Frank continually having to speed up to keep up with her stride. Then, he asks, “You know… anything about the kid? If it’s okay, or-”

“It is. Somehow,” she tells him, coming to a stop outside a closed door, in another wing of the hospital he doesn’t recognize. “All I know is they did an ultrasound, and it’s gonna be okay. But she…” She drifts off, pressing her lips into a tight line. “I don’t know what she’s thinking, what she wants to do. She isn’t okay. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody like this. She was keeping herself up all night crying, before. That was when she was still… _doing_ anything. Now she’s not. She just stares. I don’t know what to do, and she won’t talk to me. She won’t talk to anyone.”

She looks at him suddenly, jaw clenched. “Look, I don’t know why she wants you here, after everything. If it was me, believe me, I would’ve slapped you with a restraining order ages ago. And if you hurt her, Frank, if you upset her in _any_ way, I swear to _God_ -”

“I won’t,” he says, and he means it, even if part of him thinks maybe he can’t help it, how he hurts her without meaning to, how all he’s ever done is hurt her. “Promise.”

Michaela glowers. Doesn’t seem to believe him. But she goes for the door regardless, nudging it open and stepping inside, and he follows.

The sheets are folded neatly on the bed. That same med student from before – Meggy, her nametag reads, her name is Meggy – is helping Laurel down into a wheelchair, talking to her in low, hushed tones, but she may as well not be saying anything at all, because Laurel isn’t looking at her. She has that same thousand-yard stare, at something a million miles away, and she looks much the same; only cleaner now. She’s changed out of her hospital gown into a loose t-shirt, with sleeves that are up high enough not to brush her burned arm, wrapped in bandages. And fragile has never been an adjective that’s come to his mind to describe Laurel, ever; she’s always been impossibly strong, steel-spined, her resolve hard as diamond, but she looks it, right then. Fragile. So small. Like he could make one wrong move and break her without even touching her.

She looks up, when he steps inside, but that’s all she does – looks. Her eyes are on him but he can tell she isn’t seeing him, not really.

He doesn’t know what it is she’s seeing. He can never hope to know.

“There he is,” Meggy says, trying to force a smile for Laurel’s sake, then looks to him. “You’re Frank, right? Here to take her home?”

He blinks, but nods quickly, eyes still locked on Laurel, all tangled, unwashed hair and sunken eyes. “Uh, yeah. Yeah.”

“Great,” she chirps, again, though the sound falters, her chipper veneer slipping for the briefest of moments. “We’re all set, then.”

Meggy rolls her out, and he walks at her side along with Michaela, listening as she gives them a rundown of the care she needs, for her burns. Changing the dressings on her arm at least three times a day. Monitoring the nerve damage in her hand. She might need surgery, again. Physical therapy she definitely will. Her arm isn’t moveable as it stands; she’ll need help getting dressed. Bathing, too.

And it shouldn’t be him here, he thinks, again. Doing all that. Helping her. Taking her home. If he knew what was good for her he’d leave now, leave and never look back, stop trying to piece together whatever they’d had, like a child fumbling with tape and Elmer’s glue, repairing something too broke to have any hope. She’d be better off without him. With Michaela to be there for her. Or the others. Or Bonnie.

It shouldn’t be him, here. _Why him_?

The drive to her apartment is silent, and he carries her things up the stairs as she trails behind him with that same silence, all the familiarity between them gone, in place of it a cold wall, in the iciness of her stare. The hate she feels towards him. She hates him for living instead of Wes. There’s nothing he can do to make that right. He has to try, now, to be good for her. Be there, if she’ll allow him.

He’s fucked up in the head. He’s not right. He knows that, and he looks at Laurel as she steps inside, and sees that same damage. That same look in her eyes. That detachment.

Look at them. Both of them. Look at what they’ve become. Broken creatures. Barely breathing.

And there’s nothing he can do to make this right, make things right in the world for her again. But he can try. He can sure as fuck try, for her – even if his definition of what he has to do, exactly, to _try_ is nebulous, growing more so the longer he’s around her.

He takes her bag of belongings to the bedroom and sets it down, then reemerges to find Laurel still standing exactly where she was when he left her, near the doorway, eyes darting around, taking in her world like it’s all new to her, and he knows it is; after a loss like that, something so enormous, earth-shattering, everything feels different, tinged with unfamiliarity. It feels wrong to even entertain the idea of normality. Go back to doing something as _normal_ as standing in her own apartment. Everything should feel different because it _is_ different, and it isn’t, and he can see her mind struggling to process the fact that it doesn’t, that this all feels more normal than it should.

He doesn’t know what to say, for a while, but he can’t let them remain in silence forever, and it’s abundantly clear she’s not about to do the talking so he starts, with a low, almost desperate, “You need anything?”

Laurel’s eyes snap over to him. Then, she gives him a tiny shake of her head; almost dismissive.

Okay.

Okay. He nods back, faintly. He gets it.

“You want me to go?” he asks next.

Her reply this time is slightly faster, sharper. Another shake of her head. _No._

Okay. So she doesn’t want him to go. She hates him, probably can’t stand the sight of him. But she doesn’t want him to go, even if she doesn’t particularly seem to want him to stay either. She gives a look, then looks away, eyes unfocused once more, and all at once he can sense that she’s left him. Gone away on the inside.

Draw her back. He should try to draw her back, talk to her, ground her. But he also isn’t sure he should. He doesn’t know what to do, how to behave around her. He doesn’t know anything.

All he can do is stand there, watch her, until finally Laurel flinches, centering herself, and disappears down the hallway, into the bedroom without a word, feet padding across the carpet. Until she’s gone, noiseless as a ghost, as if she’d never been there at all. He keeps standing still, standing there, long after she’s gone. Frozen in place, limbs all impossibly heavy.

Where does he go from here. He genuinely has no clue. What does he do. Even sitting down anywhere feels wrong, like he’s unwanted, an intruder in her life, or what was once her life and isn’t now, not at all. He shouldn’t be here, and he knows that. And she doesn’t want him here.

She _does._

He has to cling to that. She _does_ want him here. Even if it’s just so she’s not alone. Even if it’s for a reason he’ll never understand. He’ll stay, come and go at her pleasure, do her bidding, like a dog. Sniff out the answers she wants, no matter how much blood he has to wade into to get them. He’ll get them.

He doesn’t know what to do, right then, as he stands there, idle. He figures there’s nothing _to_ do, except get up. Keep going. Keep breathing, operating his lungs, swallowing, letting his heart beat. Controlling and fueling the machine that is his body, cold and mechanical. And he can do that, for her. With her. He will.

He’s still standing, with her. _For_ her. She’s the only reason he is.

He shouldn’t be here. But he is. He is, and he’s got to figure out how to keep the both of them moving, now.


	2. II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to mention that this fic can be read as being in the same universe as [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8628361) here I published a few weeks back. This is basically a darker expansion on that little universe because it intrigued me :)

It feels like purgatory, being here with her. Like they’re caught in an endless loop together.

She still isn’t talking. Never leaves the apartment. She has a semi-established sort of routine, at least, as she goes about her day. Wake up, usually sometime around noon. Sometimes shower, most times not. Eat the food he makes her – though the amount she eats varies drastically, some days almost nothing.

Sometimes, on what he figures is a good day, Laurel makes her way out into the living room, sitting beside him on the couch he’s all but made into his primary residence, and turns on some daytime talk show, hugging a pillow to her chest and watching in silence with him, expressionless. Still blank. Gone, on the inside.

She was always the quiet one. Now she’s just silent.

He tries to talk to her, when she’s around in the kitchen or living area and not hidden away in her room. He talks about stupid, trivial things, blabbers on until he gets sick of hearing his own voice. About things that don’t matter. The weather. Baseball. News. Whatever he thinks might interest her. Most days she seems to barely hear him. Sometimes she does. On good days she even sort of seems to be listening.

She does have good days. Not many. But some.

Sometimes he feels like he’s playing a part, playing the stable one. Faking it because he needs to be strong for her. He’s not stable, or strong. He’s as fucked up as she is, probably more, but he’s better at hiding it. Their first week together passes and still, sometimes, those dark, lurking thoughts find their way to the surface. Of ending it. Leaving Laurel alone, like he should’ve from the start. But they occur less and less as the days go on and he’s drawn deeper into her silent, solemn little world; as he helps her sponge bathe and dress and change the dressings on her wound. She doesn’t flinch, when he touches her.

Not that she lets her touch him often. Only when he needs to. Only out of necessity.

She doesn’t flinch. And he’s no longer sure she hates him. He has no damn clue _what_ she thinks of him, anymore, but he doesn’t think she hates him.

It feels like purgatory, and the longer he’s here with her the more he becomes convinced it is; that maybe they really are dead and this is the world they’ve gotten trapped in, that eternal waiting room, that middle ground in the afterlife between heaven and hell – though he’s sure if he really _were_ dead he’d be in hell. A world of silence, with only each other for company, fated never to speak, just to exist in the same sphere with so much distance between them.

This is the world they inhabit, repeating itself endlessly, over and over, a hellish cycle. Same shitty black coffee in the mornings and reruns of Doctor Oz in the afternoons and orange bottles of pain pills at night and endless calls from Michaela and the others that Laurel never returns. Same everything, with only choice deviations.

And then one day, one very large deviation shows up at their doorstep.

Frank opens the door when he hears the sound of knocking, and suddenly there is the med student from before standing in front of him – sans her nametag, but he remembers her name. Meggy. She’s still clad in green scrubs, like she only just got off work, and blinks when she sees him come into view.

“Is… Laurel here?” she asks, looking past him into the apartment, and he frowns.

“You’re from the hospital.”

She nods. “I’m a friend, too. She asked me to bring her something. Is she here?”

“Meggy? Hey.”

A voice behind him, suddenly. Familiar. Hoarse, from a lack of use.

Laurel’s voice.

He hasn’t heard it in so long that it sends a shock through his system, and he turns and suddenly she’s there, clad in sweatpants and a baggy Middleton t-shirt, having emerged from the bedroom. She’s pale. Gaunt. Thinner than she should be from her weeks in the hospital eating only what little food they could shove down her throat, clothes hanging loosely off her body, her cheekbones sharper, jutting out harshly. Lines on her face, where there weren’t lines before. She looks older than she should, too. Years older. There’s still not much recognition in her eyes, much brightness, but there’s decidedly more than there’s been in a while, and it stuns him.

Just to hear her voice. Hear her talk. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed it.

This isn’t purgatory. He doesn’t know what this is, but this isn’t purgatory. Can’t be. Not if she’s talking.

Laurel nods down the hallway, toward her bedroom, and Meggy follows her, purse clutched close to her chest, eyeing him warily. Laurel closes the door behind them, and he tells himself he isn’t going to listen, pry, stick his nose in things that don’t concern him, but he can’t help it and lingers near the door anyway, under the guise of folding some of her towels and placing them in the linen closet just outside; a task he has no logical reasoning for doing at this moment in time, admittedly.

Nothing, at first. Just low, hushed tones. Then-

“ _Did you bring them?_ "

Laurel. Her voice is soft, barely audible. But he can hear it.

There’s a pause.

" _I could get in a lot of trouble for stealing these, you know. Get kicked out of school. My career would be over-_ ”

“ _I know._ ” Her voice is mournful, now. Softer still. “ _Thank you, for doing this._ ”

“ _You should go to a clinic, Laurel, they can give you these too. They aren’t completely risk free. Planned Parenthood, or-_ ”

 _Planned Parenthood._ He freezes. He knows what Meggy’s brought her, suddenly, and it makes him swallow, hard, painful as forcing a jagged rock down his throat. And he doesn’t know what to feel, right then.

And he figures out quickly he doesn’t _get_ to feel anything. This isn’t about him.

“ _I can’t,_ ” she says, simply but firmly. _“I just… I can’t, okay? I can’t_ be _in a place like the hospital again, I… And I can’t go in there. Explain to them what I want. After everything…_ ” A pause. A long one. “ _I can’t wait. I just need it to be done. I can’t be pregnant, for another day, I…_ ”

“ _Are you sure about this? Really sure? Because… if you aren’t-_ ”

“ _I’m sure._ ” That same firmness. There’s a sharp edge to her voice, now. Something harder. Cutting, like a blade. “ _Don’t try to change my mind, okay? Just don’t._ ”

“ _I won’t. I’d never do that._ ”

More silence, thick as fog, so thick Frank can feel it even outside the door, all-pervading, deafening. He tenses, waiting with bated breath for the next sound, the next word.

“ _How does it work?_ ”

“ _There’re two different pills. Mifepristone is the first. You take it, and it blocks the hormone the pregnancy needs to continue. Misoprostol is the second one. You take it after two days. It contracts the uterus to… expel the embryo. It’ll cause bleeding. Cramps. You’ll miscarry, basically._ ”

Another, lengthy pause, as Laurel digests this. He wonders what she’s thinking, right then; he never seems to know, anymore. She hasn’t discussed the baby – or, well, anything at all – with him, and she doesn’t have to because it doesn’t concern him, not in the least. He’d be selfish and entitled to think it does.

He listens in, closer, angling himself towards the door when Laurel continues, “ _How do I know if it worked?_ ”

“ _Normally after two weeks you’d go see a doctor, to confirm it worked. But if you don’t want to… we’ll figure something else out._ ”

“ _Okay,_ ” Laurel says, lowly. “ _Uh, okay._ ”

More silence.

“ _I should go._ ”

Meggy’s voice, now. Growing closer to the door. Laurel’s sounds out to stop her, however, before she can reach it.

“ _Meggy?_ ” Meggy must turn to listen, because she says, “ _Thank you._ ”

“ _Yeah._ ” Her voice is low. Solemn and curiously sad, and he wonders why, and knows, somehow, that Laurel knows Meggy in some deeper way she isn’t letting on. “ _Yeah, sure._ ”

He ducks into the bathroom when Meggy opens the door, to stay out of view, and only makes his way back out into the hallway when he’s certain she’s gone. He debates, briefly, leaving Laurel alone. Letting her do what she needs to do by herself, wrapped in all her silent suffering. This doesn’t concern him. This baby isn’t his. It belongs to a dead man, and he doesn’t blame her for not wanting to bring a child into this awful, bloody, merciless world, into their equally bloody lives. Into a world with so much pain, a world that can only ever hurt it.

A world with people like him.

It wouldn’t be right. He doesn’t blame her. But he also can’t leave her to do it alone. Hurt and bleed alone.

He’s standing in the bedroom doorway before he really knows what he’s doing, not allowing himself time to think twice. Laurel’s eyes flick up to look at him, and she’s seated cross-legged on the bed, holding two little pale blue boxes, filled with what he can only assume are the pills. She doesn’t seem surprised to see him, oddly enough. She stares at him. Just stares right through him like he’s made of plexiglass.

For one horrible moment he’s certain she doesn’t intend to say anything to him; to give Meggy her words but conspicuously deny them to him – not that she owes him her words. She owes him nothing, but _God_ , he wants to hear her speak to him. Needs to. He can’t live in this silence another second, not without ripping his hair out, going more insane than he already is.

“You heard.”

It isn’t a question. She knows the answer, knows him well enough to know he’d been listening. He feels guilt spike through him, but she doesn’t seem angry. She doesn’t seem… _anything_. There’s all that blankness, emptiness. Flatness that’s almost worse than any emotion she could direct towards him. But it isn’t a question, so he doesn’t give an answer; he just stands there.

_Stupid. Fucking stupid. Say something. Anything._

She speaks for him, lowering her eyes to the boxes, turning them over and over continuously in her hands. She looks so small. A small, sorrowful creature, and that’s what he’s begun thinking of the two of them as: creatures. Something less than human. She lost her humanity the night of the fire.

He lost his ages ago. He can’t remember when.

“I know I should wanna keep it,” she mumbles, without looking at him. Her words are low, measured, but they have that same, devastating empty timbre to them that rings hollow. It doesn’t sound like her brain is forming the words. He doesn’t know where they’re coming from. “It’s all I have left of him. But I can’t, now. Not now.” She sniffs, though she doesn’t look like she’s crying. He thinks he sees her give a lopsided, humorless smile. “I’m supposed to keep it. That’s the movie cliché, right? The father’s dead. My sole… reason for living now is his baby. I’m supposed to have it. Raise it. Keep him alive.” She scoffs. “That’s a stupid fucking cliché.”

Her words are astringent in a way he’s never heard them before. Laurel has never been one to refrain from profanity, has always been partial to dry humor, but the way she uses that profanity and that dry humor is far different, almost unrecognizable. Everything about her manner of speaking is different, sardonic and sour.

Now he’s the one who can’t speak. Who can’t find a single goddamn word to match what he’s feeling. Silence is easier.

Silence had been so much easier than _this._

Finally, he musters his voice. “You don’t gotta do anything.”

“When I was kidnapped,” she begins suddenly, voice ringing clear, more emphatic, markedly less hollow, “the men who did it… kept joking about sharing me. Raping me and getting me pregnant, sending me back to my dad like that. And then you…” She shakes her head. Another terrible grin makes its way onto her lips, and _fuck_ , he thinks, he’d almost prefer her silence to this, to these awful words. She meets his eyes, finally, still with that smirk tugging one side of her lips upward. “You told me the first time you met me I was just gonna get pregnant and quit my job and be nothing. And you were right about me.” A laugh; soft, wet. Mirthless. Just as awful. “You knew, somehow.”

“I didn’t know anything,” he urges, taking a step forward. “I was being an asshole, just sayin’ that ‘cause I knew it’d piss you off. I didn’t mean it.”

“Yeah, well,” she deadpans. “You were still right. And… I probably already hurt it. Killed it.” Her voice is strained, throat visibly tightening when she tries to swallow. “I drank, before I knew. A lot. And the fire, smoke…” She sucks in a breath, to steady herself, and lowers her eyes to her stomach briefly, eyeing it with a look he can’t quite discern. “It probably doesn’t have a chance. Never did.”

“Laurel…”

“I don’t want it,” Laurel says, and reaches for one of the boxes, tearing it open and liberating an oblong white pill. She seems to be talking more to herself than to him – or to the pill itself, hypnotized by the thing. “I just… I want it out of me.”

She doesn’t say anything, after that, for a long, long time. Just stares at the pill, lips pressed into a thin line, eyes distant and bleary. She seems to hesitate, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s here or because she still isn’t sure, so he shifts awkwardly, clearing his throat.

“You want me to go, or…?”

No answer, at first.

Then, without warning, she shoots to her feet.

She scoops up the boxes and takes them with her, storming down the hallway into the bathroom, and he follows her almost on autopilot, not sure what she intends to do, only knowing that he needs to go with her. She comes to a stop in front of the toilet, and pries the little foil packets out of the boxes, and inexplicably, frantically, starts pushing the pills out of them. They land with light _plops_ in the water, one by one by one, and she only stills after she’s gotten rid of them all and flushed them down, breathing heavily.

A decision. A snap one, maybe, but a decision all the same.

She’s made up her mind.

He almost reaches for her but stops himself at the last minute, approaching hesitantly. “Laurel?”

She isn’t looking at him, again. He might as well not be there at all. She’s panting, breathing ragged like she can’t calm herself, tears in her eyes. Laurel rakes a hand roughly through her hair, almost yanking on the greasy strands, giving a huff that morphs into a growl of frustration – at herself, he thinks. Her own inability to make herself go through with it. He watches her, silent. Not daring to move. Not sure how she’d react if he did.

“I can’t,” she admits finally, voice harsh, teeth gritted. She makes an odd half-stomping motion with one foot, rocking back and forth and watching the water swirl down the drain, take the pills with it. “I can’t do it.”

He dares to take one step inside – one tiny step, and she doesn’t flinch, or back off. She just keeps going.

“I can’t handle any more. Any more death. I’m so tired of it,” she says, and suddenly she sounds and looks so small, positively tiny. She reaches a hand up, smoothing it over her chin, and he sees it shaking, see _all_ of her shaking, her bones and tendons and muscles vibrating with fear, confusion. “I can’t have any more blood on my hands.”

He reaches out, stupidly. “Hey-”

“ _Don’t_.”

She brushes him off, coldly, stepping to the side, and immediately he goes rigid, remembers his place, crumples inward and retreats. He’s not her boyfriend anymore. Not _anything_ to her. He has no right to touch her, console her, so he backs down, deflating.

“I don’t want it,” Laurel tells him, and finally she meets his eyes. And there’s something in them, even if it’s pain, grief he can never even begin to understand. She’s looking at him, now. Seeing him. _Talking to_ him. “The doctors… all said it should’ve died, that night. From the trauma. I should’ve lost it. But it made it, somehow. And… I can’t kill it, after all that. I can’t.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, really. What is there to say? It isn’t his. It shouldn’t matter to him like it does, not when any one of these days, once her arm is mobile again and she’s well, Laurel could decide to shut him out of her life again – for good. This isn’t borrowed time they’re living on; it’s a month-to-month lease she’s granted him. It’s fragile, them. This. Whatever they are, if he even gets to use the word _they_ anymore.

He doesn’t know what to say. All he can come up with is: “Okay.”

Frank says it with a nod, low and understanding. He knows how much strength it takes her to make that choice, right then, how much strength it _will_ take her in the coming months. He’s not even half that strong and he could never hope to be. So he just tells her _okay_ , utters it like a promise, and it is.

_Okay. I’ll be there if you want. Or not, if you don’t. Okay._

_We’ll keep moving. Keep going. Okay._

After a minute of stillness Laurel tosses the boxes in her trash can. She brushes past him out the door and disappears again into the bedroom, and he’s still standing where he is, dumbly, not knowing what to say, _never_ knowing what to say when she returns, a roll of gauze and antibiotic ointment in her hand, and holds them out to him.

“I, uh, need to change the dressing,” she murmurs, looking suddenly like all that emotion has gone out of her again, left her with nothing. “Can you help me?”

It takes him by surprise, that sudden change, the reappearance of her blankness again. He never knows what to expect around her, anymore, when he’d once known her so well. She’s unpredictable but not in a violent, fiery way; in a cold, emotionless way. Sometimes he almost wishes she’d yell at him, scream at him, claw and slap and _hit_ him – if only to get something out of her, something instead of all this restraint and coldness.

He can’t decide which would be worse. But she _is_ talking, now, and that’s progress in itself so he makes himself stop thinking about it, and takes them from her, nodding.

“Yeah, c’mere.”

He leads her over to the toilet, and she closes the seat and sinks down onto it, holding out her right arm, exposed by the short sleeve of her t-shirt. It’s still limp, for the most part, and she can barely move it or her hand, the nerves burned to bits by the fire. Slowly, as gently as he can, he unravels the gauze around it with nimble fingers, crouched down before her and steeling himself for the sight of her burn, though his stomach turns anyway before he can help it when it comes into view.

It looks better now, after her skin graft has started to heal over it, but still grotesque and hideous. The outline of the piece of skin they’d taken from her thigh is clearly visible, pasted over the burn like a bandage, all varying shades of bright pink with yellow and red interspersed. It extends up and down her forearm, creeping up towards her upper arm but stopping just short, still oozing, still moist – but healing, from what he can tell. It looks awful, all of it, especially the burned bits outside the area the graft had covered, all that blistered, scorched flesh. And it’ll scar, bad, especially on her pale skin. But it’ll be okay.

She’s covered in other, far worse scars anyway. The type he can’t see.

Laurel whimpers when the last bit of the gauze sticks to the wound, and he frowns. “You want some of the pills?”

“No,” she says, gritting her teeth through the pain though it’s wrought all over her face, carved into them like stone. “If I don’t feel this… I don’t feel anything.”

God.

God, _fuck_ , those words kill him, just to hear how hurt she sounds, how pain is the only thing that can make her feel anymore, the only thing that can ground her, but he doesn’t let it show. He stays stoic, focusing his attention on the wound, on gently applying the ointment with the dabs of his fingers across her raw, red skin, spreading it until he’s satisfied. Then, he reaches for the gauze and re-wraps it, not too tightly, just loose enough, like he’s gotten good at doing.

His hands linger on her arm, for a half-second too long. He’s on his knees before her, looking up, and it feels fitting that he should be here like this, for some reason: beneath her, serving her; it’s the only reason he _is_ here, after all. He holds her gaze, and she looks back, still breathing hard, jaw clenching in pain. She’s so pale her skin might as well be made of bone.

She looks so tired too, so shattered, but she won’t cry out, scream, betray any weakness, anything, and she’s so _strong_ , impossibly strong, stronger than he’ll ever be. Contemplating that, he plays idly with the end of the piece of gauze on her arm, not applying pressure to the wound, just touching her because he’s missed touching her so much. Because he has an excuse, for once.

Today has been a day of revelations. Decisions. He wonders what tomorrow will be.

He never knows, these days. What they are. If they’ll be better or worse, or how to gauge _better_ or _worse_ , but in all his stupid fucking optimism he’d like to think maybe things are getting better.

He thinks, briefly, of mentioning the baby to her, but she’s put the topic to bed for today and doesn’t seem inclined to bring it up any time soon. He doesn’t know what she’s doing; having a baby she doesn’t want but can’t get rid of – out of guilt. She can’t see anything else die – especially not her last piece of Wes, that microscopic being she carries somewhere deep inside her that defied all odds, survived the horrors of that night. And he doesn’t blame her.

He also doesn’t know what the answer is. Has no goddamn clue.

So Frank just kneels there in silence, smoothing his fingers across the dressing, resorting to the silence that has become their natural state, together. Letting her feel his touch, if she wants. If it helps in any way. She doesn’t seem to be welcoming it. But she isn’t rejecting it, either.

“I didn’t mean it, in the hospital. Before,” she confesses after a while, so tired she looks like she might fall forward onto him right now. “When I said it should’ve been you.”

It takes him aback, at first, and he blinks. Frank isn’t altogether sure about that. He thinks she _had_ meant them then, bitter and angry as she was, but now she’s looking at him, repentant, genuine. Talking to him. Apologizing. It’s more than he ever could’ve hoped for.

He loves her so much he can’t breathe.

Frank nods. “I know.”

They don’t move, after that, and that’s all they say. They stay there, him still holding her arm, her still slumped forward on the toilet seat. He doesn’t know how long. Time loses any real meaning, any definitive end and beginning and intervals in between, but he thinks it’s a relatively long while. He just cherishes the feeling of her, of being close to her. Having her somewhere in roughly same space he is. It feels like peace. A peaceful sort of stillness, but none of her emptiness now.

She’s looking at him, now. _Really_ looking, and seeing him. And he’s here. He’s here with her.

Maybe this isn’t purgatory after all.


	3. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've decided to restructure this fic a bit, just because I didn't feel like I could wrap up everything in only nine chapters, so this will be ten parts instead. I've modified the summary accordingly :) Enjoy.

If her apartment is purgatory, then the hospital must be hell.

She’s back for surgery again over New Year’s, an attempt to further repair the damage done to the nerves in her arm, and something about the potency of the medications they give her and her own morning sickness combine to keep her up for hours on end, hunched over the toilet in the bathroom, pale and shaky and miserable.

He’d thought things were getting better. But the longer he’s with her here the more he’s convinced they’re just getting worse.

He tries to stay up with her as long as he can, and he does, at least until her stomach has given the impression of settling and she’s drifted off into a restless slumber in the bed sometime around ten. It’s only then that he curls up on the couch and manages to do the same, though he toes that line between slumber and consciousness for what feels like forever, inhabiting that hazy umbra, shivering without a blanket in the freezing cold little suite.

After a while the distant echoes of the sound of Laurel vomiting in the bathroom make him stir, and he hauls himself to his feet, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and making his way into the next room. He finds her, unsurprisingly, on her knees by the toilet for the hundredth time today, shuddering in her paper-thin hospital gown, face obscured by shadows. The cramped little bathroom is even colder and twice as sterile, all outside walls and spotless, frigid tile floors that might as well be ice, with a toilet and a sink and a pod-like shower. In the darkness everything looks bleak and grey – except for the trickle of moonlight flowing in through the tiny window high above the sink, falling on Laurel where she kneels like a silvery halo. It reminds him of a painting he’d seen, once, where the golden light of God had been shining down on some woman who was kneeling, prostrating herself, hands extended out in front of her.

But there’s no God here. This is a godless place if he’s ever seen one.

More robotically than anything he falls to his knees behind her, sweeping her hair up into his hands for the hundredth time today and holding it back as she heaves; mostly dry heaving now, since she threw up what little food she’d had in her stomach hours ago and hasn’t been able to keep anything down since. She doesn’t react, only grips the sides of the bowl until her knuckles go ghost-pale, all the blood leaving them. After a moment the nausea subsides, and she spits the taste out of her mouth, swinging her hand up to flush the toilet.

“You good?” he asks. The question reverberates off the tile walls, that same hollow, tinny echo, and he scoots a bit closer, releasing her hair.

She nods, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yeah.”

He climbs to his feet and grabs one of the clear plastic cups resting on the sink, filling it with water and crouching next to her, holding it out. Laurel takes it without a word and sips, then sets it aside, moving across the floor away from him until she’s leaning up against the wall, pressing her cheek to it even though it must be freezing cold. She looks awful, weak and woozy from the surgery, exhausted.

In the moonlight her skin looks like carved marble. She might as well be a statue; she reminds him of one. One of those sad-eyed, monumental angels in a cemetery, eternally peering over the dead. He can’t even tell if she’s breathing, and he’s not sure, anymore, if she _would_ breathe if it wasn’t a reflex, if she would just stop, given the choice.

She isn’t looking at him, or speaking, but she hasn’t done much of that all day so he’s not surprised. Something about coming back to this place stole her words all over again, and they’re back to silence.

But he can work with this. He’s used to it by now.

“I’m gonna sleep in here, I think,” she mumbles. “I have to keep getting up.”

“Okay.” He gets up and settles himself down next to her, even though she’s angled away from him, knees drawn up to her chest. “I will too. Somebody’s gotta hold your hair back.”

“I can hold my own hair,” she insists.

“I know,” he admits, and finally she shifts, turning her head back to look at him. “I want to.”

She just looks at him, for a moment, then lets out a sigh and turns fully, pressing her back against the wall, lining herself up at his side in a tacit show of acceptance. It’s only then, as they sit side by side, that he notices just how hard she’s trembling, her teeth chattering in the cold, and so he fetches a thin pink blanket off the bed, returning with it and draping it over her lightly. Laurel doesn’t say anything, but she does take it and clutch it tightly to her with her one working hand.

He doesn’t speak, either. He sinks down beside her, drawing his knees up closer to his body too and resting his forearms on them, a semi-fetal position he thinks might be able to trap some of his body heat. They just sit, together, in that little grey box, in the stillness, until finally Laurel speaks again.

“I hate this place,” she remarks, hoarsely. “I hate being here.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he holds back any superfluous words he could give her, any trite words of comfort. Silence is more profound. It shows understanding. And he does.

He understands.

“There’s no point anyway,” Laurel continues, glancing down at her bandaged arm with contempt. “My arm’s never gonna work right again. My hand. They told me that. I just… want them to stop trying.” A pause. She stares straight ahead, eyes trained on some invisible focal point. “I want everything to stop.”

His heart clenches. Silence, again, and it’s not profound this time. It’s empty, weighed down by sorrow and suffering, suffering so immense he can feel it radiating from her. He can’t do anything to try to lessen it. He recognizes futility when he sees it, but he can listen – whatever meager, shitty consolation that might be to her.

“My mom tried to kill herself, y’know. When I was thirteen,” she recounts, eyes hazy and words garbled, tongue loosened from the painkillers in her system. “I found her. She slit her wrists in the bathroom. Don’t know why she didn’t just take a bunch of pills. Pills woulda hurt less. Maybe she wanted to feel it. The pain.” She pauses, and he sees a tear plunge down her cheek, which she wipes away hastily. “She begged me just to let her die. Leave her there. And I never got it. How someone could… hurt so much they wanted to be dead.” She swallows. “I do, now.”

He can’t breathe. He can’t. His skin prickles with terror. “Laurel…”

“I wish they’d left me in there with him,” she says, ignoring him. “I wouldn’t have felt anything. There was so much smoke. And… I couldn’t breathe. Move.” She raises her eyes to the window, returning to that awful night and dragging him back in time with her. “They shoulda just let me burn.”

Fuck. Fucking hell, he can’t take it. The thought of Laurel burning alive. The thought of seeing her body, blackened and charred, flesh slipping off her bones. Dead. Dead and gone for good.

“Please,” his voice breaks, tears welling behind his eyes, “please don’t say that.”

She stops, for a few minutes, as though understanding just how much she’s hurt him, then looks his way again, suddenly pointed.

“Bonnie told me what happened, at the house. You were gonna kill yourself. You wanted to die,” she says, as if intrigued, oddly eager in some twisted way. “We could do it. Together.”

She wants to be dead. It feels like swarms of insects are crawling beneath Frank’s skin at the realization. She wants to die. She wants to do it with him. The first bit of fire he’s seen in her eyes in so long, and it’s there because she’s talking about killing herself. So plainly, openly. Like it’d be the same as squashing a gnat.

Like it wouldn’t even fucking _matter._

He stays calm, somehow. “I don’t wanna die anymore.”

“Why not?” she asks, and she seems genuinely bewildered by the idea, the thought that he could somehow, after everything, still want to live.

It’s the truth. He’s not lying. He doesn’t want to die. He had, that night, the darkest of his dark moments, his lowest low. But not now. Not when she’s here, and he’s with her, and she needs him. And Bonnie. And Annalise, even if Annalise hates him.

He has reasons to live. Not many. But enough.

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to tell her she’s the reason; he doesn’t know how she’d react to that, if she’d think it a burden, one more burden on her shoulders she doesn’t need. After a moment Laurel sighs, eyes dropping down to her still-flat stomach and staring hard, as if imagining the baby tucked away there, hidden from sight; the baby she barely mentions at all though she’s almost three months gone now. He’d thought maybe she’d even forgotten about it – but she hasn’t. He can see that now.

“I’m not gonna do it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she says. “So don’t worry.”

Quiet. It’s one they can’t seem to fill, this time, but suddenly Frank can’t stand it: being beside her and not speaking, not saying anything after so many months without her, longing for her. He’s being a fucking idiot. He’s established that he’s fucking stupid.

Time he do something about it.

So he starts talking, if only so she has something to listen to, pull her mind from this moment, her pain. Distract her.

“I’ve been seein’ somebody,” he starts, and she frowns.

“Like… dating?”

“Nah,” he shakes his head, running a hand over the thin, bristly patches of his beard, coming in just how it’d looked before. “Psychiatrist. She’s been helpin’ me. Talk through stuff. Feel normal again.” He pauses. “Not like any of us can ever be normal again.”

“Why?” she presses.

He gulps, lowering his eyes. “I’m not… right, in the head. I’m fucked up.”

“We’re all fucked up.”

“I know. But there’s somethin’ wrong with me. Really wrong with me.” Suddenly all he can see is blood. Fire. The sound of a neck snapping. Sound of Bonnie’s dad wheezing as his lungs were scorched, melted, breathing in poison. He hadn’t even really cared. He hadn’t liked it, but he hadn’t _cared_ , and he swallows again, choking down some nonexistent bile. “I’m not right. You know I’m not.”

“My mother is schizophrenic. I probably got it from her. Or… will get it. I’ll go crazy.” She meets his eyes, flattening her lips into a line. “Sometimes I think I already am. But… it was nice while it lasted, y’know. Us.” She rests her head against the wall, as if on the brink of drifting off. “You took me to meet your parents. Cooked me dinner. We played house. Pretended to be normal. But this is the real us.” A smile. One of those awful dry grins that curls at her lips, sinister. “This is who we really are.”

He lets the words sink in, as they lapse into silence once more. She’s right. Those roles they’d played, the characters they’d hidden behind, those carefully-planned scripts they’d recited under the guise of normalcy… Those weren’t them. That character especially wasn’t him, and now all of him is laid bare for her to see, all the horror, the ugliness, peeling back his skin to reveal the blood and decay and maggots festering beneath. He’d said he’d wanted her to know him. He’d invited this on himself.

He hadn’t known what he’d been asking for.

“Why’m I here?” he asks suddenly. “I shouldn’t be.”

She shakes her head, staring straight ahead once more. “I don’t know.”

So she doesn’t know either. Doesn’t know why she’s letting him stay here with her, care for her, all but _live_ with her. She should, by all logic and reason, despise him. Maybe part of her does. Maybe part of her can’t be alone. Maybe he’s here because he’s a habit for her, something familiar, nothing more.

Maybe part of her, stupidly, irrationally, still loves him, even broken as this thing between them is, even broken creatures as they are, barely clinging to a thread of life. Weeks ago he’d wanted to die. She wants to die now. Neither of them are living. He’s not sure what they’re doing if not living, but they aren’t.

Frank pulls his phone out of his pocket to check the time, idly, not knowing what else to do, and finds the screen lighting up with _12:01 AM, January 1 st_. He gives a rueful little grin, holding it up so she can see too.

“Happy New Year, huh?” he says, in a lame attempt to lighten the mood, draw a smile out of her, and she looks for a second like she’s going to try to grin but doesn’t, in the end. She just looks at it, face illuminated by the hollow glow of the LED screen, taking it in impassively.

She lets her eyes slip away after a moment, resumes staring at some fixed point on the wall in the darkness. She doesn’t care about the New Year. Suddenly it all seems so trivial, so meaningless, the thought of celebrations, the revelry occurring outside of this place – normal celebrations, for normal people with normal lives. Time is time, to her, to him. Time means nothing.

A new year. Not a second chance, fresh start, not the beginning of anything particularly groundbreaking. Not a landmark that means much of anything to either of them. But a chance for things to get better, maybe. A chance, for something.

He may be an idiot for it. But he hasn’t quite let go of his optimism yet.

They don’t say a word, after that. Frank lets the shadows fold over them, and it’s only after Laurel somehow manages to drift off beside him, her scrawny, too-thin body giving into the pain medication and her own exhaustion, that he scoops her up into his arms, careful with her bandaged arm, and brings her back over to the bed. He watches her sleep into the small hours of the morning. Watches her chest rise and fall in the light of the gathering dawn, like it might abruptly stop, like her body might simply give out, grant her that sweet release of death she wants so badly.

Like he might lose her at any second. But he thinks of the emptiness in her eyes, that flat, grey look about her that he no longer recognizes at all. And he thinks maybe he already has.

 

~

 

In the morning a chipper blonde nurse with Hollywood-white teeth barges into the room unannounced, an ultrasound machine in tow.

“Rise and shine,” she chirps, and Laurel frowns over at her, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes as she comes to a stop beside them, followed by another woman; some technician or other, Frank can only assume, as he squints at them through the bright sunlight from his seat at her bedside. “Time to check in on the little one.”

“Oh,” Laurel says, not hiding her dismay well at all. “I… didn’t know we were doing that.”

“Just a little check-up,” the other woman, middle-aged with frizzy red hair, all but coos to her. “To make sure baby’s doing all right post-op. Would you mind lifting up your gown? We have a sheet for your lower half.”

Laurel looks reluctant, but doesn’t protest and does as they say, tugging her hospital gown up around her hips and letting the nurse fold a blue sheet over her, before ducking out of the room. It takes Frank a moment to process so much happening so fast, but then he remembers something one of the doctors had said before, amongst all their fast-talking medical jargon and phrases he’d only half-understood. Her pregnancy is high-risk, after the trauma she’d sustained, the surgeries she continues to undergo. They want to keep a close eye on her. That means frequent ultrasounds. More regular doctor visits and closer monitoring.

He doesn’t have to ask, right then, to know that Laurel doesn’t want to do this.

Any other expectant mother would probably be overjoyed for her ultrasounds, but Laurel is sullen, silent. He knows part of her still doesn’t believe it’s real. Maybe part of her is pretending it _isn’t_ – but when she lifts up her gown he can see the very tiniest beginnings of a bulge in her stomach, a curve he knows will only expand up and out, inevitably. She won’t be able to pretend forever. She can’t run from what’s happening in her body, as much as she’d like to.

Much as they’d both like to.

“All righty,” the tech says, switching on the machine and squirting what looks like an excessive amount of gel onto her exposed abdomen. She looks to him, and smiles. “This is dad, I assume?”

Frank freezes. Laurel goes still on the bed, very still, but before she can open her mouth-

“That’s me,” he blurts out, giving her a half-assed flicker of a grin. “Guilty as charged.”

Laurel looks grateful when she turns her head to him, and that’s why he’d done it: to spare her the pain of explaining the truth – that _no_ , this isn’t the father, that the father is dead and buried six feet under, that the father never even knew about this baby to begin with. So he jumps in without thinking, lying through his teeth, and the tech seems to buy it.

“Great! Now just give me one minute and…”

She drifts off, guiding the transducer across Laurel’s stomach in search of something, and Frank has no idea what, exactly, but he watches the screen nonetheless, all indiscernible, flickering blotches of grey and black, like a television screen with no signal. He has a spike of fear that maybe he can’t see anything because there’s nothing _to_ see, because the baby slipped away silently somehow during the night, during surgery. Or before. And now it’s gone.

Another shape, then, flickering in. Something lighter.

A sound. Thudding.

A heartbeat.

It stops his own heart, must steal the beats to fuel its own because everything goes silent inside him. It sounds muffled, at first, and distant, almost like it’s underwater. There’s something lighter, all of a sudden, there on the little screen, not contrasting exceptionally sharply with the rest of the grey, but enough so that he can tell it’s different than the other shapes. And all at once there’s no hiding from what it is, what the heartbeat signals, what is revealing itself to them bit by bit on the screen.

The baby.

He’d known the baby was real on a logical, rational level, of course, but he hadn’t really _known_. He’d struggled for weeks to process the idea that Laurel was pregnant, hating that it consumed him so and knowing it shouldn’t. And after she’d decided to keep it, even then it hadn’t processed right, the fact that there was a life inside her, growing away. He hadn’t been able to wrap his tiny brain around it, understand the magnitude of the child’s existence. He’d only cared what it would mean for Laurel – and by extension, for him. He’d only thought about it selfishly. So stupidly selfish, like always.

He knows, now. He _knows_. This is a child. A human life. It’s not about him. It’s bigger than him. It’s _so much_ bigger than him, or her, or either of them or anyone that it’s almost laughable.

Not his.

It isn’t his. But it might as well be, for the way he can’t breathe, the way he can’t tear his eyes from the screen. The way his heart is still stuttering, trying and failing to resume normal functionality. Frank thinks he may have to accept that it never will again.

“There we go,” the tech’s voice fades into his consciousness, lilting and light. “And there’s your baby.”

A head. Arms. Torso. Legs. The woman goes one by one, pointing them out cheerfully, even though Frank thinks half of the things she identifies don’t bear any resemblance to their real-life, fully grown counterparts. It’s a tiny thing, blurry white, encased in a bean-shaped black outline, small as a tadpole. Hardly recognizable – but real. Heart beating. It’s terrifying, loud and steady as a drum, and it makes him freeze, and at the same time it makes him melt, his heart clenching, to hear the tiny creature inside of Laurel declare, over and over, that it’s here. That it made it.

He’s astounded. Then he looks over at Laurel – and he sees it, again.

That same blankness. Same stare. Somehow it’s worse than any other expression she could give; that empty look, eyes glazed over, all gone away on the inside, all nothing. He’d been hoping maybe the sound of the baby’s heartbeat would stir something in her, some emotion, something. _Anything_. Jostle something loose and bring her back and make her _feel_ – but it hadn’t.

It’s just scared her back inside herself again. Chased her off and flicked some internal off switch and booted her down into that semi-alive state that seems to be the only way she’s capable of going about her days. She watches the screen only with the vaguest disinterest.

She might as well be watching nothing at all.

After a while the tech switches off the screen and hands Laurel a cloth to wipe off her stomach with, beaming. “Would you two like a print-out? I’ve got a few righ-”

“No, thank you.”

Laurel cuts her off before she can even finish her sentence, voice soft but sure, and Frank glances over at her, not knowing what to say. The tech seems equally taken aback, and blinks, her exuberant smile faltering for a moment before it recovers.

“Of course,” she makes herself chirp, rising to stand. “I’ll get out of your hair then.”

It doesn’t take long for the woman to collect her things and vacate the room, and after she’s gone Laurel stays where she is for a while, hospital gown still hiked up around her hips, staring at her belly, at that minute curve there, still gleaming faintly from the gel. Frank goes to help her get settled again, but stops himself when he notices Laurel reaching up, pressing a hand tentatively on her stomach, pushing down like she half-expects it to move suddenly, spring back, come to life out of nowhere. Still empty. Still nothing in her eyes. She’s observing her own body like it’s some foreign object, like it isn’t hers. Like she doesn’t know whose it is anymore.

“I don’t want it,” is all Laurel says, finally. The confession is soft, almost too soft to hear. Hardly a whisper. “I’m trying to make myself. But I don’t.”

She doesn’t even really sound like she’s talking to him. He doesn’t know _who_ she’s talking to.

A ghost, maybe. Her ghost.

 

~

 

He takes her home from the hospital a few days later, after they judge her well enough to be released, and back to her apartment they go. There’s nowhere else _to_ go.

Their lives replaying on that loop, from day to day. Secluded and isolated. A world they can’t escape. Laurel hasn’t been to class since the night of the fire. She’ll probably drop out for the rest of the semester formally, soon, and maybe for good; all that goodness, all that light and desire to do good has been wrung out of her, by that night, by the pain, by surgery after surgery. And he… He has nothing, either. No job. No prospects. Only weekly sessions with his psychiatrist who actually, sometimes, seems to be helping him, if anything or any _one_ can really help him, now.

He has nothing to do but exist with her, here. Endlessly circling her like a planet locked in its orbit, never able to get close. Fated always to remain at a distance.

He’ll take it. Distance is better than nothing. Distance is something, at least.

They don’t mention the sonogram, what she’d said about not wanting it. Laurel barely talks about the baby at all, gives any indication she even remembers she’s pregnant at all aside from popping her prenatal vitamins in the mornings and nights. Frank doesn’t bring it up. It’s not his place, though sometimes it’s like he can feel a clock ticking, counting down until the baby comes, and Laurel isn’t even remotely prepared; emotionally, financially. And he isn’t, either.

He thinks, though, that they do have a tacit understanding. That they’re in this together. He hopes, at least.

She doesn’t mention the sonogram, for a while. And then, one afternoon in mid-January when Laurel is lying on her couch half-dozing, half-watching Maury, and he is seated off to the left in the armchair, she finally does.

“I didn’t get that picture,” she remarks, out of the blue, and when Frank looks over at her he can see her eyeing her stomach, head propped up on a pillow. “The ultrasound printout. I should’ve gotten it.”

He has no clue what’s prompted this. Probably it’s the endless stream of baby daddy mysteries on Maury, or one of the Pampers commercials with cherubic, smiling babies that seem to be playing on every channel these days. Or maybe it’s the darkness of her own thoughts, that prison he can’t even begin to understand the inner workings of. But whatever it is she says it, voice clear and strong, eyes alive. She says words and sounds like she’s actually putting some meaning behind them, and that’s all that matters.

When he doesn’t say anything, she continues, glum, “All moms probably get it. And I didn’t. Like I didn’t even care.”

Frank can see the doubt in her eyes, the fear that she’s already a horrible mother because she didn’t. He sees it, and it sends him into a sort of eerily calm panic – to convince her she’s not. Convince her that she isn’t because she _does_ care. She must.

He knows her. Knows she must.

“Why’re you thinkin’ about that?” he presses, gently, not sure what he’s trying to draw out of her. Thinking, for a moment, that he almost sounds like his fucking psychiatrist.

She does something with her shoulders that looks faintly like a shrug. “I don’t know.”

He thinks, for a moment, then stands without explanation, disappearing into the bedroom briefly and going for one of the dresser drawers; the drawer she’d cleared out for him, after accepting that he was here to stay. He rummages for a second, past a pile of flannels and t-shirts, until finally he locates what he’s looking for: a familiar little grainy black and white printout.

He hadn’t told her about it. Hadn’t told anyone.

Frank reemerges after a moment and finds Laurel right where he’d left her, still staring at her stomach and pressing on it now and then. Her eyes flick over to him when he comes into view, brows knitting together when he reaches out to offer her the picture.

“Frank…” she drifts off, sitting up and taking it. “What is-”

“It’s from that day,” he explains, unsure how she’ll react. “I chased the lady down after. Got her to give it to me.”

“Why?”

 _Why._ He has no clue _why_ , what’d spurred that sudden, irrational attachment to the tadpole-like creature he’d seen that day, what’d made him hunt down the woman afterward, stash the photo away, take it out from time to time just to look at it. He thinks that if he told her the whole truth, about how sometimes he can’t sleep for thinking of it, lying awake holding the image in his mind’s eye, she’d be mad. That she’d think he’s decided he’s going to be something to this baby, something to _her_ that he isn’t. That he’s made himself too important, in his mind.

That he’s trying to make a baby that isn’t his _his_. So Frank just shrugs, giving a faint _Dunno_ , even though he does.

Laurel doesn’t say anything at first. She stares at it, for a long while, lying back and holding it up, studying it closely, expression unreadable. But there’s no blankness now. He can’t tell what there is, but it’s not blankness, not empty; it’s too complex to parse, really. He thinks he can see fear. Mostly fear.

Eventually, a warmer note. Something almost like affection.

“Here,” she says suddenly, holding it back out for him to take, apparently having decided she’s seen all she needs to see.

Frank shakes his head. “Nah. Keep it. Think of it as a… late Christmas present.”

Laurel looks like she’s about to protest, for a moment, but before she can Frank crosses the room, ducking into the kitchen and grabbing a bag of chips out of one of the cupboards, ending a conversation he doesn’t want to have before it can begin; he can already hear Laurel’s protestations, insistences he take it back, and he wants her to keep it. _Needs_ her to. So Frank stands behind the counter to eat, lingering for longer than he needs to, not for any real reason than to have something to occupy himself with.

He has a near-perfect line of sight to Laurel where she lays on the couch, and before he can help it he’s watching her again, his eyes drawn to her like the force of gravity. And after a moment she holds the picture up again, taking it in, maybe memorizing it just like he had, until he’d dreamed that fuzzy pattern of grey and white and black night after night, until it was burned onto the backs of his eyelids.

She looks, again. And it may just be a trick of the light, or his imagination, or wishful thinking or all three, but Frank swears he sees her almost, almost smile.


	4. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't gotten a tremendous amount of comments on this fic, and honestly, this is one of my favorite things I've written in forever, so if you guys could let me know what you think too, I'd ADORE it!! <3

Laurel disappears, one night.

He runs out to the store for a little while, to stock up on food and replenish their dwindling pantry, and returns to an empty, pitch-black apartment, with no sign of Laurel whatsoever. It’s all eerie and still, haunted by ghosts, lit by the silver-blue moon.

Immediately his mind starts running through worst-case scenarios.

“Laurel?”

He makes a bee line for the bedroom first, and she isn’t there, and as far as he can tell all her clothes are still in her closet and her suitcase under her bed, so she hadn’t skipped town in his absence, though he has no clue where she’d go if she did. Frank paces around for a moment, idly, not knowing what to do with himself, then glances out into the hallway and catches sight of something.

A light on, gold seeping out of the crack in the door.

The bathroom light.

His heart rockets into his throat, lodging itself there painfully next to his Adam’s apple like a bramble. The bathroom. What if she did it. Ended it, like she’d talked about. Decided she didn’t need him to do it with her after all and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. Or slit her wrists, like her mother. Left herself to bleed out, left him to find her, and _fuck_ he can already see it, can already picture the pool of blood beneath her limp, lifeless body, can see the image flashing before his eyes, in and out of view. So vivid and real that he swears he can even smell it.

What if she’d done it while he was gone. Because he left her alone. He shouldn’t have _left_ her.

“Laurel? You in there?”

Oh God. God, fuck, he should’ve stayed and none of this ever would have happened, none of it, she’d needed him and he was gone, and he’s so fucking _stupid_ and-

He nudges open the door, and the room comes into view. And the light is on, but she isn’t there; all he finds there to greet him is gleaming porcelain and cold tile. No Laurel.

She isn’t anywhere. She’s just gone.

He can feel panic careening towards him, coiling around his lungs and squeezing tighter with every breath he takes, like a boa constrictor nestled inside his chest cavity. He dials her number, holding his breath after each metallic ring, praying she’ll pick up – but when her voice finally comes over the other end it’s only her deceptively cheery voicemail with a brief, laughing, _This is Laurel. You know what to do_. He calls three times after that, then abandons that course of action and tries Michaela instead. He doesn’t think it’s likely she’s with her; ever since Wes died she’s been angry at her and the others, distrustful of them, and unsurprisingly Michaela tells him she isn’t there. He tries Bonnie, next, and she isn’t with Bonnie either, and he knows Bonnie would’ve probably already called him if she were anyway.

That leaves him with one person. The only other place she could be.

Annalise.

He isn’t sure. Doesn’t know how likely that is, either. She’d been released last week pending her trial; Bonnie had told him she’s been staying with Nate. Laurel’s never been close with Annalise. They’d only had one common denominator: Wes. But that might be enough for Laurel to go to her seeking comfort, and before he can think better of it he’s dialing her number, swallowing, fidgeting anxiously.

He isn’t sure she’ll even pick up, but on the fourth ring she does. And all she gives him is silence.

No greeting. Not a word.

To be fair, he probably should’ve been expecting that. They haven’t spoken since she went away, since that night months ago, the night he’d almost killed himself. Bonnie had done his share of the talking for him, mediating between the two as they’d worked together to get her out of jail, visiting in his stead. Annalise hadn’t wanted to talk to him then. She must not now, either – but this isn’t about him. Fuck him and his feelings; they aren’t what matter.

He finds his voice, after a moment, low and hesitant. “Annalise?”

“What do you want?”

She hisses the words; not that he was expecting any less, any kind, cheery pleasantries. Frank half-flinches, but doesn’t back down. “I, uh… I wouldn’t have called, but-”

“But what?”

More coldness. Cold as ice. Worse, somehow, than Laurel’s coldness. Even now the amount of power Annalise has over him is immeasurable and he hates that, wants to break away but has no goddamn clue how. She owns him. She’s always owned him.

Probably she always will.

“Laurel’s missing. I got home and she was gone,” he explains, glancing out the window into the frigid February night, thick snow blanketing the ground. It’s below freezing, colder than it’s been all winter; if she’s outside, somewhere, he know he has reason to worry. “She with you?”

“No.”

He exhales sharply, swearing under his breath. “ _Shit_.”

“But I know where she might be.”

Frank furrows his brow. “Where?”

“It was three months ago, today.”

He isn’t sure what she means at first, the gears in his brain all locked up with panic, but after a moment he realizes. The fire. The fire was three months ago today. Wes.

And he knows where she is, then.

 

~

 

The cemetery is dark and deserted when he puts his car into park and hops out.

His shoes crunch on the wet snow as he makes his way over to Wes’s grave, to the kneeling silhouette he can see in the distance; Laurel’s silhouette. It’s coming down harder now, somewhere in between snow and sleet, pelting him, gnawing at his skin like it’s trying to strip it off the bone. He passes rows upon rows of headstones, some sunken into the ground and covered with snow, others older and taller and weathered black by the elements. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his wool coat, tugging it tighter around him as a vicious, howling wind whips through, so cold it’s blistering.

He should’ve known she’d be here.

Laurel doesn’t move when he comes to a stop behind her. Doesn’t even look up, or give any indication she’s heard him approach even though he’s sure she has. She’s clad in her grey winter coat and a thin scarf but no other outerwear, not nearly enough to be out in this weather for any extended period of time, and he has no clue how long she _has_ been here, but he figures it’s been a while. Her hair is speckled with snowflakes and ice, eyes locked on the headstone in front of her; a flat marker, engraved grey granite laying flush with the snowy ground.

_Wesley Gibbins._

_1992 – 2015._

It’s nothing particularly expensive or ostentatious. Quiet, in a corner of the sprawling fifty-acre cemetery, where there aren’t many other grave markers. It fits Wes, even in death; isolated and unobtrusive.

Frank doesn’t say anything, at first. This moment isn’t for him, and he knows that. Knows that Laurel’s grief is an intensely private thing for her; something she’s kept close to her chest, something she hasn’t seen fit to share with him yet, if she ever will. He’ll never know what Wes meant to her, maybe. Never properly understand it. He was her best friend; a kindred spirit. Her teammate from the start, and later on, after he’d left, her lover.

Lost in the ashes. Gone.

Taken.

“Hey.”

He speaks up finally, and Laurel glances back at him, eyes glassy but no tears on her cheeks, as if she’s been out here so long that they’ve frozen to ice in her eyes and can’t fall anymore. He can see her shivering, faintly, her bare hands folded in her lap, and immediately he’s worried, worried she’s been out here too long, frozen half to death already.

She doesn’t say anything, for a long moment. Just looks at him. Stares. But he’s used to her unnerving staring now, the distance in her eyes, and it doesn’t faze him much. Instead he aches to reach out to her, but stops himself, stands back.

This isn’t for him. This isn’t _about_ him, what he wants. Not now.

“Hi.”

Another howling wind, cutting around the gentle hillside, slicing through it and through them. Brutal and icy, and Laurel looks so small that for a moment he imagines it might blow her over, sweep her up on it and carry her away.

“How’d you know I was here?” she asks after a minute, and he steps forward so that he’s standing by her side.

“Called Annalise. She said you’d probably be here.” He gulps. “You weren’t there, when I got back. Didn’t know where you were.” _I got scared._

He doesn’t say the words, but he thinks she can hear them, hear his fear. Laurel hums, disinterested, clearly not much affected by that, and is silent for a moment more.

“I just wanted to be here,” she says, finally. “With him. It’s so cold tonight. And I thought-” Her voice catches in her throat. “I didn’t want him to be alone.”

She sounds so sad that it kills him. She hadn’t wanted Wes to be alone – even in death. Even if she can only keep his cold bones company now. And he may not understand the true magnitude of her suffering but he thinks he can feel it, feel how badly she’s hurting, in her bones, in her core, sick in her heart, sick in her _soul_. It aches, in every part of her, and she’s so tired, wants so badly to stop. But she’s nowhere near done and there’s no end to it, not one he can see.

She doesn’t talk about Wes, much. He doesn’t know if it’s because it’s too painful, or if it's because of him, because she thinks he wouldn’t understand or doesn’t want to hear it – when he does. He wants her sorrow, her mourning, anything she’ll give him. He _wants_ to understand her, wants to make it all stop hurting, if he can, even the slightest bit. He’d been angry, once, stupidly angry. Jealous of Wes at first. But after a while, those two weeks leading up to the fire after he’d gotten back, he’d realized he’d just wanted her to be happy. She was happy, with Wes. She loved Wes. Wes was – and _is_ , and now always will be – a part of her.

That doesn’t make him angry. He doesn’t know what to feel, sometimes, but he isn’t angry.

And this isn’t about him anyway.

“Laurel…”

“It’s stupid,” she says, sucking in a shaky breath. “I know. I know he’s not here. But I wanted to be with him.” She pauses. “Tell him about the baby. Everything.”

“That’s not stupid.”

Laurel considers that, before lowering her eyes, letting the words roll off her. “I just… want to talk to him again. See him. Just for a minute.” She sniffles, the sound thick with mucus. “That’s all I want.”

It’s not a lot to ask for. But it’s still too much.

Death doesn’t give you time. It takes and takes and takes. Doesn’t grant requests. Doesn’t _give_ anything. It isn’t worth the asking and she knows that.

Laurel raises her chin, raises her eyes to the cloudy night sky as if to keep her tears from falling. Her lower lip trembles. _All_ of her trembles, and he opens his mouth to say something but she continues before he can, eyes trained sharply on the headstone, burning hot, two shimmering blue coals.

“I didn’t go to the funeral. And it didn’t matter. It was closed casket.” A tear. One, two. Three. Then so many he loses track, like some invisible dam inside her spilling over its edges. “He had burns, over ninety percent of his body. And Meggy said… he didn’t look like himself, anymore. And I didn’t want to be there.” She grits her teeth, nostrils flaring. “See everyone pretend to be sad. Act like they cared. They never cared about him.”

He swallows, thickly. He knows she isn’t wrong. In Laurel and Annalise’s absence, he and Bonnie and the others had been the only people there who had known him – really known him, and even then not nearly as well as she had. The rest had been random students, in Annalise’s class, at the clinic; people who’d barely known him, spoken to him once or twice, but came to give their condolences anyway. They’d had only just enough people to be pallbearers.

He’d helped carry the casket. Felt the weight of it in his hand, the weight of the world. The weight of Laurel’s world.

He’d carried it for her, that day. Carried it for both of them.

No family. Both parents dead. Hardly anyone to mourn him, with Annalise behind bars and Laurel burned and sedated in the hospital. It’d been a lonely little funeral, after the crowd at the chapel had thinned out and only the six of them had been left at the gravesite. It hadn’t been right. None of it.

They remain there without a word, for a few minutes, wind and sleet beating at them relentlessly, chipping away at them like crumbling cliff sides. Laurel isn’t shivering anymore. She’s gone still as a block of ice. Her skin looks tinted blue, colorless. Her hair is damp, from the snow and rain, her breath thick fog rising into the night, and before he can help it concern settles in his gut again, taking root.

“How long you been out here?”

He nudges the question forward gently, not wanting to disrupt her, make her angry. Laurel sighs.

“Don’t know. I left right after you did.”

He does a quick mental calculation. He’d been at the store for about an hour; she’s been out here at least that long, and he may not know a lot but he knows exposure of that length can’t be good – for her or the baby.

“We should go. You’re freezin’.”

“Yeah,” she mutters, so quietly he almost doesn’t hear. “Just a sec.”

She stands, reaching into her pocket and pulling something about – and it’s only after she’s set it down in front of the grave that he sees what it is: that little grainy picture from the ultrasound, grey and black with that little blot of white in the center, that irrefutable snapshot of life. The thing Wes should be here to see, in person, with his own eyes.

It makes his throat tighten and he doesn’t know why, and he watches mutely as Laurel places it there on the grave, brushing a little snow onto it to keep it weighted down so that it doesn’t immediately blow away – though he knows it will, inevitably, in this storm. Blow away and be lost to Wes and the world, and mean nothing in the end.

It’s their only copy. But she wants him to have it. Wants him to see. It’s more important than either of them seeing and Frank knows that.

He understands.

He sees a change in Laurel, as she stands there. A shift, in almost everything about her. Her jaw clenches, set strong, tough as stone. Her eyes are steely, full of tears but suddenly, right then, full of such an inferno of _anger_. Her hair blows madly in her face, and her body trembles madly from the cold but otherwise she stands stock still, feet planted on the ground like they’re cemented there. Stance strong, so strong, but not just strong. Some measure beyond strong; the kind of strong you get from repeated kicks and blows and suffering upon suffering. _Hardness._

She was a sorrowful spirit, until today. But right then he watches her shed that skin in the snow and become an avenging one, all the fight and fury of a phoenix contained beneath her skin. And when she turns to head back towards the car she looks like a woman going to war, chin raised, eyes blazing, stamping her feet through the thick, crunchy snow and not looking back.

And he follows. Her solider into battle. Her knight. Her anything.

He’d be her anything, so long as it means being near her.

Laurel tries to get into her own car but Frank insists she’s too upset to drive anywhere, and if she weren’t chilled to the bone and on the brink of hypothermia he thinks she would protest, but she doesn’t; she just relents and settles herself down into the passenger side of his BMW, which he starts immediately, turning the heater on full blast, in the hopes he can keep her warm long enough for them to get back to her apartment, get her into the shower and thaw her out.

He doesn’t shift into gear, though. For a while they just sit there, unmoving, the heater and defroster running, watching snowflakes and sleet melt on his windshield. It doesn’t feel right to drive off, to leave this place just yet; Frank doesn’t know how he knows, but he does. He glances over at Laurel, practically swallowed up by her coat, but she doesn’t look small like she had before – no, no at all.

She looks so powerful he’s in awe of her. She’s done being sad, now, and he can see that. She’s made up her mind. She doesn’t want to mourn, anymore.

He thinks he knows what she wants, now.

“The funny thing was?” she starts, a dark amusement in her eyes. “I know we wouldn’t have lasted, together. I went to him… because you were gone. And he was there. And I needed someone. And it’s not that I didn’t love him. I did. He was… my person.” She pauses, taking a second for contemplation, choking down her tears, chewing up that weakness and swallowing it. “He was my best friend.”

“I know,” Frank says, lowly, and reaches over, resting his hand on her knee out of habit, out of instinct, and realizes it too late to correct his mistake.

And he does. He does know. He thinks he’s accepted by now that Wes knew Laurel in a way that he never has, in a way he maybe never will. They were so similar, alike in so many ways. Understood each other so well. He thinks, maybe, he should be jealous of that, envious, but he isn’t. She’d felt understood, with Wes, his friendship. Free. She’d felt _happy_. And he may be a selfish sonofabitch, but he’s not so selfish that he can’t see that. Not so selfish that he wishes she’d never had that happiness at all.

Surprisingly enough Laurel doesn’t push him off; she doesn’t really seem to notice his hand, or care. There’s that fire inside her, again, rising up like the eruption of a volcano. All that emptiness pushed out of her in its wake.

“He didn’t deserve to die like that,” she all but spits the words. “He _didn’t_.”

Frank doesn’t know what to say to that. So he plays it safe, plays it cowardly, says nothing at all. He wishes he were better with words, but he knows no amount of words he can give her will ever make things better, and before he can come up with anything she’s talking again, teeth gritted.

“I want to find who it was. I want to know _why_ ,” she says, looking over at him, eyes locked on his so intensely he thinks he may stop breathing, “and then I want to kill them.”

He freezes.

He’s never seen her like this. He’s seen Laurel angry before, of course, seen all her quiet rage, but nothing that even remotely comes close to _this_. She looks so hateful. Teeth barred. Eyes sharp enough to cut. Bloodthirsty and thirsty for vengeance – but somehow simultaneously deathly calm. Terrifyingly rational.

He knows that look because he’s felt it too. That desire for revenge. All-consuming. He knows because he’s seen it before, seen it in himself, and seeing it in her, seeing her so hardened and angry, the kind of anger that simmers, grows in secret like a cancer until one day without warning it’s everywhere, controlling your mind, your every thought… It terrifies him.

She’d said she didn’t want any more. Any more death. Any more blood. Clearly now she’s changed her mind.

It makes him sick – to know her anger, the immensity of her suffering, that it’s broken her and brought her to this point. He knows she means it; he can see it in her eyes. She wants to kill whoever did this. Honest to God, he thinks that if it were him, and he told her right now, right this moment, she’d slit his throat without any qualms about it.

He’s always known she was dangerous. The quiet one, the most dangerous. But he thinks he hadn’t fully appreciated just _how_ dangerous.

“Laurel-”

“You said you’d find who did it,” she says, suddenly. “You still mean that?”

What is there to say but yes. He can’t tell her no. He’s never been able to refuse her anything, and looking at her now, after he’d left her for all those months, hurt her so badly, broken her to bits, there’s nothing he can do but nod. Yes, he’ll help her. Sell his soul to get what she wants. Go to the fucking ends of the earth, march straight into hell and back for her.

He’d do anything she asked. All he can do is pray she won’t ask too much.

“Yeah,” is all he can say. “And I will.”

“Good. I’m gonna help you.”

He bristles, mind going immediately to the baby, the parade of doctors that’d told her to avoid overexcitement, stress. Avoid harming her already fragile pregnancy in any way. He isn’t a doctor himself, doesn’t know much at all about anatomy, but he doesn’t need to be to know that all her anger, her rage and grief, and now this, can’t and won’t be good for the baby.

“I don’t th-”

“And don’t say I can’t because of the baby. Because I need to think of the baby,” she spits, as if reading his mind. “I’m done sitting around. Doing nothing. I want to find who did this, and I want to kill them, and if you have a problem with that, Frank, then I can do this by myself.”

Nothing is going to stop her, he realizes, right then. Nothing in the world. She’ll do it with or without him, even if he protests, and he simply nods, knowing he has no choice and not wanting to leave her to go it alone. For all he knows Wes’s death could’ve been the Mahoney’s handiwork too, and he knows she doesn’t need or want his protection, but he’s not letting her go up against those kind of people alone. Get herself hurt. Get herself _killed_.

She’s leading the charge, foolhardy as it may be. She doesn’t think she needs backup and maybe she doesn’t. But he’ll supply it anyway.

“I’m in,” is all he tells her, straight-faced, grim. He pauses, eyes and tone softening. “We’re doin’ this together.”

“Okay.” Her gaze lingers on him for a minute, and then she presses her lips into a line; not a smile, but a show of understanding, acceptance. “Together.”

Frank shifts the car into gear, not long afterward, guiding it down the skinny, icy cemetery road, past headstone after headstone, those cold monolithic symbols of death. And now Laurel wants more. More death. More blood.

He wonders how much further they can go before it’s _their_ blood. He doesn’t think it’s very far at all.


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve switched up this fic’s summary a little (or a lot) just because the more I’ve written it, it hasn’t really been vignettes of a pregnancy at all and has focused on a lot of other things and taken me different places. So, this one feels more comprehensive. I’ve also added a few tags that won’t come into play until chapter seven, but it's pretty heavy stuff so I wanted to give y’all fair warning that it's coming up.
> 
> Enjoy! And please, if you have time, leave a comment. I would be suuuuper grateful.

Frank can’t remember the last time he was on a stakeout.

Something for Annalise, no doubt, back when his life had had some semblance of order and relative normalcy – yet here he is again, like nothing much has changed in the time since. Binoculars in one hand, the other resting on the console between the car seats. A few discarded bags of potato chips shoved into the cup holder.

Laurel at his side, lying in wait, ever-patient. Ever- _deadly_.

“It’s getting late,” she remarks, fidgeting in her seat and shivering in the thawing early spring night. “Maybe no one’s coming.”

“Give it another hour,” he says, not tearing his eyes from the large brick building housing Middleton’s College of Law, and their particular point of interest tonight: Annalise’s clinic. “No one shows by then we bounce.”

It’s not a perfect plan, Frank will admit, but at this point no plan can be. He’d been making an effort to get information about Wes’s death early on, something, _anything_ , to appease Laurel while she was incapacitated in the hospital for those long weeks. But he’d come up with nothing then, distracted by worry for her and Annalise, and then, later on after he’d come to stay with her, caught up in her care, her seemingly endless rounds of surgeries. According to Nate, by now any leads the police had have long gone cold, leaving them to find their own.

So he’d done what he does best: he’d gone digging, a dog with a bone.

The Philly PD was, as always, predictably inept in their investigation. With the fire eradicating any traces of physical evidence or DNA, they hadn’t had much to go off of – save for a statement from a shaky witness, who said they thought they’d seen a shadow running from the house that night, after the fire. Probably a man. But they weren’t sure, and when Frank digs deeper he finds out it was only an old, half-blind neighbor, unreliable and no use to them.

He’d gone deeper still. Nate had supplied the full autopsy report. Cause of death: two stab wounds to the chest, using a knife roughly the size of a kitchen knife. The police hadn’t recovered the murder weapon. Most likely the perp had taken it with them – and Frank doesn’t fancy himself any sort of criminal profiler or anything like that, but a knife as the murder weapon, and the subsequent sloppiness of the killing, implies a lack of finesse. A snap decision. Not a well-thought-out plan.

That all but eliminates the Mahoney’s. One of their men would’ve used a gun, most likely, or their own bare hands. Something neater that wouldn’t have necessitated a fire to cover it up.

Process of elimination. One by one.

The motive, then? Wes was going to the cops. Found out about Rebecca. He was going to take down Annalise, all of them.

But Annalise wasn’t at the house. She wouldn’t have done that to Wes anyway. Bonnie would’ve told him if it was her, had him help her clean up her mess like she always does, and even if she hadn’t he can read her like a book, knows she would never do something that would hurt Annalise like that.

He suspects Nate, for a while. Nate was at the house before the explosion. Nate would probably do just about anything to protect Annalise. Nate seems suspicious, forthcoming, almost _too_ forthcoming, but thanks to Oliver’s hacking he manages to place Nate at the police station at the time of death. Oliver himself? Couldn’t hurt a fly.

That leaves him with the rest of them. Michaela. Asher. Connor. All likely enough candidates, he figures – except maybe Prom Queen; she doesn’t seem to have the stomach for murder, if what Laurel told him about her reaction to Sam is any indication. But Wes was going to the cops. He was going to take them all down. It might’ve pushed her, might’ve pushed the others over the edge. Self-preservation is an instinct stronger than any other in the human psyche.

It might’ve pushed her. Might’ve pushed any one of them.

God knows it’d pushed him.

It’s not a perfect plan, tonight. Far from it. They’d enlisted Oliver to plant some phony evidence on one of the clinic’s computers; supposed evidence about Wes, though Frank doesn’t know specifics. Then they’d gotten Annalise and Nate to convene a meeting of the remaining Keating Five, during which they’d told them about it, convinced them the cops would be by the next day to serve a search warrant in connection with Wes’s death.

That had been this afternoon. If one of them is going to come, going to take the bait and see what the so-called evidence is, it’s going to be under cover of night.

It’s going to be now.

He’s lost track of how long they’ve been here; both dressed all in black, not talking much, eyes fixed on the door of the building across the street. He’s nervous, and he doesn’t get nervous often but he is now, chaos bubbling beneath his skin, keeping him on edge, a pit forming in his stomach. Part of him is praying no one will come.

If someone _does_ come… If Laurel gets what she wants-

He derails that train of thought before it can venture further. He has the situation contained, Annalise and Nate at the ready. Nothing is going to happen. No one is going to get hurt. They’ll know for sure, that’s all. They’ll know and that’s all they need – but that’s not what _Laurel_ needs.

And if it doesn’t end tonight she won’t stop. She’ll _never_ stop.

He tries not to think about what that might mean for him. For her. For all of them.

They’re both silent, cloaked in shadows to hide themselves from view. It’s warmer than it has been but it’s still cold, frost tinting the edges of his windows. Every now and then he chances a look over at Laurel, and finds her with her jaw clenched, eyes never moving, shifting in her seat to get comfortable, and it’s dark but he can still discern the rounded silhouette of her belly, too large to be hidden much now, or mistaken for anything else other than what it is.

He sees her squirm again, and glance down, pressing a hand to her stomach, feeling around for something. She frowns, for a moment, before letting out something that’s almost a laugh; a breathless, tearful, crazed half-laugh, half-sob, like he’s never heard her or anyone laugh before. It’s a disturbing sound, and it dies quickly, her breath picking up, like she can’t catch it, struggling to slow it down before it snowballs into hyperventilation.

“What is it?” he asks, and again, she emits another one of the sounds, closer to a sob this time.

“He’s kicking,” she tells him, and she sounds so torn between joy and grief in that instant that he doesn’t know what to say, what to do. “I can feel him.”

 _He_. They’d found out the sex a few weeks back, at yet another ultrasound. She hadn’t been able to hide her disappointment, and it’d been a few days before he was able to coax the reason out of her: she’d been hoping, desperately, secretly, for a girl. She hadn’t wanted a boy.

A boy would look too much like Wes.

It’s not the first time he’s kicked, either. The little fluttering movements started last month, and have since then only grown in frequency and strength; a good sign, he’d told her. Means it’s strong. Means _he’s_ strong. But Laurel still doesn’t seem entirely reconciled to her pregnancy yet, even months later, even now, her mind too occupied by grief and anger and her quest for vengeance to think of much else. He can never tell if she enjoys feeling the kicks, or if they just remind her of everything she’s lost, if that gentle stirring, that petite sign of life, only ever reminds her of what Wes isn’t here to feel.

She still hasn’t let him feel yet. He hasn’t asked. Those moments belong to her – not him, and he knows his place, knows to keep his distance. Can only hope, one day, maybe, she’ll let him share in those moments too.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he soothes, lowly, not knowing what else to say other than that stale reassurance. “All right? I know it is.”

He doesn’t know what he means, what he thinks is going to be okay. Nothing. Everything. But everything isn’t going to be okay, ever again, and the words fall on deaf ears, and Laurel barely seems to hear them. They’re silent, for a while afterward, before she lets out a sigh, breathing finally slowed, and glances over at him. Even through the thickness of the night her eyes are intensely clear, the moonlight catching the grey in her irises, making them glitter dangerously, like knives. Twin bullets.

“I know you think I’m stupid. Or crazy,” she says, straight-faced, unflinching, and she sounds so angry, so hardened and hateful, that Frank thinks for a moment he hardly recognizes her. “But I need to do this. For Wes. And for him.” She gulps, casting her eyes down once more to her belly, to her son. “I need to do this for them.”

 _Do this_. Kill. It still turns his stomach, the thought of her crossing that line, entering that dark, sinister place, that place that’d turned him into something less than human. He has, if he’s being honest, no actual intentions of letting Laurel kill anyone tonight, though she certainly believes the contrary, and he has to keep up that façade if he wants to make it through this without adding to their body count. Laurel might hate him forever, for denying her this. This kill. He doesn’t care.

As long as he keeps her from doing it. From crossing that line you can’t come back from.

From becoming like him.

Frank meets her eyes and nods, grimly. “I know you do.”

And he does. He does know. Doesn’t mean he has to like it, or let her do it – but he understands.

They fall into silence, again. Fifteen minutes creep by with nothing. Then thirty.

Then, around the forty-five-minute mark, finally, headlights flash in the distance.

They perk up immediately, exchanging a look in silence, and watch as a blue Audi pulls over to the curb in front of the building and comes to a stop, the engine cutting. He hears Laurel’s breath hitch, at the sight of it, as it peels away from the black night and stops, coming into view. She knows that car. It takes him a moment to think it over, but he realizes he does, too. Doesn’t need binoculars to know who it belongs to.

And the door swings open.

And there, glancing around furtively in the darkened street, is Connor Walsh.

Laurel goes so still he’s not even sure she’s breathing, but doesn’t say anything at first, just watches with him as Connor circles around the front of the car and skulks onto the sidewalk, ducking around the side of the building to access a back door. Frank holds up his binoculars, observing him as closely as he can, and as far as he can tell the kid isn’t armed, not that he’d expected him to be. Which is good. No gun. One less complication to deal with – or so he thinks.

Because he doesn’t know Laurel has a gun on her until she loads it.

The sound of the magazine latching into place – that low, affirmative metallic click – shoots through him like lightning, and when he glances down at Laurel’s lap he sees her clutching a pistol firmly in her hand. Loading it with skill and practice, like she’s done it before – and he knows she has. She’s serious about this, tonight. She’s not fucking kidding and he knew that, and somehow it still sends a shock through him.

He clenches his jaw, as she slides it into her back pocket. “Laurel, what the _fuck_?”

“You knew I owned a gun,” she deadpans, without looking at him. “Why wouldn’t I bring it?”

“No. Uh uh. No way in hell are you bringin’ that with us,” he growls, voice low, as menacing as he can make it because she doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of this situation; of taking a life. She regards it almost like it’s nothing at all, like it’s just another task that needs completing, and _fuck_ that disturbs him so much, because that’s how it is for him. And she shouldn’t be like him. She can’t be like him. “Leave it here. Or give it to me.”

“I want him dead. I’m _taking_ it with me.”

Her hand reaches for the door, but he grabs her wrist, stilling her. “Listen to me. You don’t wanna go in there with that. Long as you got it? Fine. But he wrestles it away from you? Turns it on you or me?” He clenches his jaw so hard his teeth feel liable to break into bits. “You could get hurt. The _kid_ could get hurt. You want him dead, I get that. But don’t be stupid about this.”

Laurel hesitates, at first. Half-looks like she’s about to throttle him, eyes narrowed and blazing, but when he mentions the baby he sees her melt, relent somewhat. She doesn’t want the baby getting hurt; he knows she could never live with herself if something happened to him, and so, finally, she passes the gun to him, glowering, and rises to her feet, jumping out of the car with a disgruntled: “ _Fine_.”

Frank gulps, throat dry as a desert, and tucks the gun away in his own back pocket. And what else is there for him to do but follow.

He trails after her into the building, down a dark, empty corridor past classrooms and offices, eerie and deserted in the night. He texts Nate a quick alert, to move in; Annalise is with him, and he’s sure Annalise isn’t thrilled he’s in on this plan, but she’d wanted it too. Wanted justice for Wes. Hungered for it, probably even more than Laurel has.

If Laurel doesn’t get to Walsh first, finish him off, he has no fucking _clue_ what Annalise will do to him.

He tries not to think about that and soldiers on, footsteps light, eyes flitting around the hallway, around corners and behind them, to make sure no late-night janitorial staff are on their trail. For all her added weight and shifting center of gravity, Laurel still moves stealthily, graceful as ever, chin held high, and he follows her down to the end of the hallway, to the rooms that comprise the clinic.

There are large glass windows in the main room of the clinic which they duck down below, allowing them a near-perfect line of sight into the room save for the blinds hanging there, cinched half-shut. But even through the blinds they catch sight of Connor easily, standing behind one of the computers, the blue glow of the screen making him look almost ghostly in the darkness – and little does he know, Frank thinks, with something like a wry, awful grin, that he’s pretty goddamn close to becoming a ghost tonight, if Laurel gets her way.

Frank expects her to wait, stop and review their plan of attack before heading in, or at the very least look to him to make sure he intends to follow, but she doesn’t. She just raises herself to her full height, all imposing five feet and four inches of her, and strides right in the door.

“What’re you doing here?”

He’s still crouched down below the window, and ducks in after her hastily, coming to stand by her side. Laurel’s voice rings out sharp, clear as a bell, laced with venom, and immediately Connor flinches, eyes flicking up to look at her, then to him, then back to her.

“Laurel? Uh, what am I – what are _you_ doing here?” he sputters, standing up straight behind the desk, folding his arms, almost instantaneously resorting to a defensive stance. “What’s _he_ doing here?”

“Answer the question,” Frank orders, voice bone-chillingly deep, raising his chin.

“You-” he sputters, emerging from behind the desk, running a nervous hand through his hair. “You heard what Nate said. There’s evidence, here, the cops think. About Wes. They’re… coming tomorrow to serve a warrant-”

“Why do you care what they find?” Laurel demands, again with all that terrifying quiet rage about her. Her tone is measured but he can see her still quivering with restraint, nostrils flaring; a hurricane of a girl about to come raging. No eye of her storm. No respite, no calm.

Just fury.

The kid manages to deflect, though everything about him reeks of guilt. “Don’t you? D-don’t you want to know?”

“It was _you_ ,” she sneers, taking a step forward. Laurel is almost snarling now, and he’s never seen her like this; a beast guided only by predatory, killer instinct. It shakes him to his bones, down all the way to his marrow. “Wasn’t it?”

Connor tucks his arms in tighter, shaking his head. “Look, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about-”

It happens in flashes, after that, like a skipping reel of film; choppy, jumping over frames. Everything in fast-forward. Before he has time to react Laurel pivots sideways and swipes the gun right out of his back pocket in one swift motion, so fast he almost doesn’t realize what she’s done until she’s storming towards Connor, backing him up against the wall with a surprising amount of force and jamming it up against his cheek, seething.

“Don’t you _fucking_ lie to me,” she bites out, as Connor goes rigid with terror, the whites of his eyes doubling in size, contrasting starkly with the night. And she’s so calm but she’s so furious. He’s never seen someone so lethal. “Tell. Me. The truth.”

Fuck. Fuck, he should’ve left the fucking gun in the car, he should’ve known she’d get her hands on it one way or another if she was determined enough, and he knows, right then, that Laurel has no reservations whatsoever about pulling that trigger, putting a bullet in Walsh’s brain and being done with it. She wants it, she wants it so fucking bad he’s never seen her want anything so much, and he tries to breathe but can’t. And decides, quickly, it doesn’t matter if he breathes or not. He just needs to stop her.

She can’t.

She _will_.

Frank blinks, initially, then springs into motion, the pit in his stomach hardening. “Laurel… Laurel, put the gun down-”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Connor squeaks, breathing heavily. “I-”

“You killed him. You did it,” Laurel accuses, voice wavering but harsh as gravel, words like bullets. Her teeth are gritted, barred at him, upper lip curled into a sneer. “ _Say it_!”

“Okay!” he cries, trembling. “O-okay. It was me. I killed him!”

“Laurel,” Frank tries to cut in, desperate. He almost reaches out, comes within inches of touching her, but stops himself, cold panic swelling inside him, rising in his throat like bile. “You don’t wanna do this.”

She ignores him. Presses the gun against his cheek harder, until it looses a whimper from his throat. She’s crying, now, tears streaming down her cheeks, unrestrained, scalding hot, but she isn’t shaking, or relenting, or giving any indication she means to do anything other than what she’d come here tonight to do. His words hit her and bounce right off.

“ _Why_?” she growls, chewing the word like it tastes foul, and Connor squeezes his eyes shut.

“He was… h-he was going to the cops, he was gonna take us all down-” he sputters. “I didn’t know what to do, I-”

“What the hell is going on?”

Another voice; a woman’s voice. Frank turns, and he finds that Annalise and Nate have joined them. Laurel glances back, briefly, but doesn’t budge or lower the gun.

“Hey,” Nate’s voice booms, reverberating off the walls. He takes a few heavy steps toward Laurel, but stops just behind Frank. “Put the gun down, Laurel, no one’s gotta get hurt tonight.”

Nothing. Laurel still won’t move. She’s a mountain, unmovable, feet planted like they’re soldered to the ground, and when Nate goes to take another step Frank puts his arm out in front of him, shaking his head, signaling for the other man to let him do the talking; try as he might Nate won’t be good for much of anything here besides brute force.

And he? He’s always been shit with words, admittedly. But he has to try, for her.

“You killed him,” she repeats, nearly spitting in his face. “You left him to _burn_.”

Connor swallows, thickly, glancing over at Frank, pleading for help. “Don’t… don’t kill me, don’t, please, I-I had to, I-”

“I’ll do it,” she seethes, through her tears. “I’ll fucking _do it_ , don’t you think I won’t-”

Frank finds his voice, finally, chancing a step towards her.

“Laurel… Laurel, wait. Think about this. You wanna ruin your whole life for him? The baby’s life? He ain’t worth it. You do this, you’re like him.” He takes a moment to steady himself, chest clenching. His voice scrapes his throat roughly, like sandpaper, but it’s a plea, now; he’s begging her, beseeching her, all but ready to pitch himself down at her feet.  “You do this, you’re like _me_.”

“I don’t _care_!” she half-screeches, turning her head back slightly to look at him. She cocks the gun, presses it closer. “He… killed him, he-”

“You think there’s any comin’ back from this? Huh?” Frank raises his voice. “Once you do this? Cross that line?”

“H-he’s right,” Connor cuts in, frantic. “Listen to him, he’s right-”

“Shut up,” Laurel sneers, and again she shoves the gun up harder against his jaw, so much so it pushes his heard to the side. “You think there’s any coming back from losing Wes? Y-you think there’s ever any way I can be the _same_ after that?”

Frank steps forward, again, until he’s almost at her side, so close he might be able to reach out and swipe the gun away, but he doesn’t trust Laurel’s reflexes to be slow enough not to pull the trigger first if he tries. The pistol is loaded. Cocked. One little squeeze, one wrong move, one goddamn _millimeter_ and it fires, and this is all over. And he doesn’t give a fuck about Walsh’s life. He couldn’t care less if the kid lives or dies.

He can’t let Laurel do this. Kill. Become like him. He _can’t_. She does this and he loses her, even if she’s still living in the literal sense.

She does this and she’s gone. Gone for good.

“Listen to me. Killin’ him ain’t gonna make things right,” he says, finally bringing some semblance of calm to his words, trying to soothe her as best he can, if he can; if he can reach her, somehow, down past all her rage, all her vengeful instincts, all those awful bitter walls closing off the Laurel he knows. “Killin’ him’s only gonna bring more blood. And we’ve had _enough_ blood. You said that. Said you couldn’t have any more blood. Any more death. I know you think you want this. But I know you. And it’s not gonna do anything. It’s not gonna do shit, okay? So please. Please… don’t do this.” He gulps, a knot bobbing in his throat. “Wes wouldn’t want you to do this, Laurel, you know that.”

There’s a moment of silence, finally. A moment where no one moves, no one speaks – hell, as far as he can tell, no one _breathes_. For one horrible moment he sees a flash forward, a jump in time. Sees Laurel pulling the trigger, heedless of his words. Sees blood and bone and chunks of brain paint the wall behind Walsh’s head. Sees his body fall, limp, lifeless, but he blinks and then it’s all gone, and Laurel is slowly, very slowly, backing off. Lowering the gun. Retreating.

Lowering it farther. Down, down – until finally it’s at her side, and at last he reaches out, prying it gently from her clammy hand and passing it off to Nate.

Laurel just stands there, after, for a longest minute in the world. Breathing heavily. Gritting her teeth. Every inch of her body is screaming with anger, hot tears in her eyes, which are frigid as ice-blue flame and burning and also somehow startlingly black, black as oil. She’s shaking like a reed in a gale, so hard he thinks he can hear her bones clattering against one another beneath her skin.

He doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t _get_ to do anything. Before he can even blink, she’s lunging forward.

Frank doesn’t see what she’s doing at first, throwing herself at Connor with a screeching roar. For a flicker of a second he’s terrified she’s smuggled a knife in with her and is going to gut him, but she hadn’t; instead, she’s balling her good hand into a fist and socking him as hard as she can in the abdomen, the blow hard, brutal. He groans in pain and crumples to the ground, and just as he’s about to prop himself up and turn his head and say something to her-

Laurel unleashes on him.

She goes wild, like he’s never seen her – like he’s never seen _anybody_. Like she’s a savage, deranged, rabid creature, not a single iota of humanity left in her. She lands a kick on him, on his stomach, then higher, on his ribs, and then another to his face, bloodying his nose, probably knocking out some of his teeth. They’re hard and fast and relentless, with the cold pointed toe of her boot.

She isn’t discriminating, or making even a slight attempt to aim. Face. Neck. Ribs. Balls. Stomach. Anywhere she can reach. _Everywhere_. She makes a sound accompanying every one of them; a screech, a growl, or some word that hardly sounds like any language he’s ever heard, pushing her body so hard that he can’t help but think of the baby, what this is doing to the _baby._

He watches with Annalise and Nate, at first, knowing she needs this. Needs to vent her anger. She can’t kill him, he won’t let her, but she can at least do this, and so she keeps going, until Connor’s cries have long gone silent, until he’s fallen unconscious, his face a gruesome parody of human features, so coated in blood and unrecognizable Frank can hardly make out two eyes, a nose, a mouth. He goes still, limbs slack – and still, Laurel won’t stop.

She doesn’t seem to _want_ to stop. Not until he’s dead.

Not until she’s stomped his fucking _skull_ in.

It’s only then that he intervenes, grabbing hold of her as gently as he can – and when it becomes clear she intends to fight him he tightens his grip, growling in her ear, “Laurel – Christ, Laurel, _stop it_!”

“Let me go!” she shrieks, thrashing violently, clawing at him. Fighting him so hard he thinks she might dislocate her arms, yank them right out of their sockets. “ _Get the fuck off of me_!”

“Stop it,” he orders, voice lower his time. He’s stronger than she is by far, and finally he manages to get a solid hold on her, dragging her away, pulling her back. “Hey, stop it Laurel, stop-”

“He killed him! He _killed him_!” she spits, and he doesn’t recognize her voice, her screams, her shrieks, wild as a banshee; he’s never heard anything like it. “I want him dead. I want him dead, I want him _dead_ , I wanna fucking _kill him_ , let me _go_ -”

All at once, she stops.

Her voice dies on her tongue, and she stills in his arms. Goes limp and boneless, giving up the fight. She bursts into sobs – but they aren’t the kind he can hear; they’re the silent, croaking, hysterical kind, her mouth wide open but nothing coming out, like she can’t muster her voice to actually make a sound, like she’s screamed and cried all she can, given everything in her already, and now her lungs are empty. Her hand reaches up to scrabble at his forearm, and finally her legs give out under her and she drops like a brick, and Frank goes down with her, holding her up. Securing her. Mooring her with his arms, clutching her to earth like she might otherwise slip away.

He’s seen her cry for Wes. But he’s never seen her break like this. Never seen her so utterly destroyed.

Hadn’t fully realized, maybe, how destroyed she really is.

He’s aching. It’s fucking agony, to see her in such pain, to know there’s not a single thing he can ever do to make it better. To feel her shake and quiver in his arms, her little body wracked with heaving sobs that seem far too big for it, impossible to actually be originating from her. He can feel them like they’re his own, and he presses a kiss to her temple, murmuring any soothing words he can muster, like he’s in a trance.

He just wants her to _stop_. It’s killing him. She’s killing him and he’s dying with her, bleeding out from the inside, and he can’t stop it – any of it.

“It’s okay,” he chokes out. He’s holding her up, keeping her upright, but just barely. “It’s okay, I’m here. I got you, it’s okay-”

She bats him away coldly, but doesn’t try to wrench herself out of his arms; she’s resigned to the fact that she’s not getting away. Not finishing the job tonight.

He’s got her. She’s breathing. Everyone is still breathing. Okay. This is all okay.

It’s not. None of it.

He’s dimly aware of Nate picking up Connor and throwing him over his shoulder, leading Annalise out the door, leaving them alone in the dark little room. Once they’re gone Frank finally clears his throat, makes an effort to talk to her, in the hopes his words can ground her, bring her back from her endlessly circling whirlpool of hysteria.

“It’s okay,” Frank tells her, again, dumbly. Stupidly. “It’s okay. ‘S all gonna be okay.”

“I want him dead,” she spits the words again, almost mindless, possessed. He’s holding her from behind, and he can’t see her face but he imagines it’s wrenched into a toothy, vicious hyena-snarl. “I want him _dead_!”

“I know you do,” he rasps, voice hoarse from yelling. Sudden, potent exhaustion washes over him, and he’s thankful he’s on his knees because he thinks he might otherwise collapse. “But… killin’ him, Laurel, it’s not gonna bring Wes back-”

“I know that!” she cries, voice catching on a sob on its way out. “Don’t you think I know that? I _know_ he’s not coming back. I know he’s dead.” Her voice goes small, right then. Positively tiny; barely a whisper. “I know he’s gone.”

He loses track of the seconds. The minutes. Maybe it’s hours that he spends there, holding her as she cries, holding her from behind, arms wrapped around her. He realizes, after a while, that she’s not even clinging to him; _he’s_ clinging to _her_. He’s clinging to her because with every sob it feels like she’s slipping further and further away, leaving him. Like she’s going to cry until her body has used up all its energy and expired. Until her chest caves in and kills her.

He doesn’t know how long it takes, but finally she calms. She calms and goes quiet, so deathly still. She feels cold in his arms, and her hand is still clasping his forearm but her grip is slipping fast. Her sobs reduce to hiccups and then snivels and then nothing. Then silence.

“He’s gonna get away with it. We always do,” she remarks, words weak, hollow. “He knows too much. If we went to the cops, turned him in… he’d just take us all down with him. And they’d send me to jail. Take my baby away from me. Let him grow up in the system. Or worse – with my father.” She inhales sharply, catching her breath, wrestling one into her lungs and holding onto it fast. “I’m not gonna let that happen.”

Frank knows she’s right; there’s no way they can get any sort of justice for Wes. If they turn Connor in it’s mutually assured destruction. It’d be stupid.

He doesn’t answer. After a moment Laurel cranes her neck, turning back to look at him. Her cheeks are glistening with moonlit tears, pain wrought like iron into the lines on her face, but abruptly, like she’d been before at the cemetery, she’s completely calm. Morbidly rational.

“Would you kill him for me?” she breathes. “If I asked you to?”       

He goes still, as motionless as stone, veins filled with ice. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe at all, and he’s convinced now it’s not her chest that’s going to collapse in on itself; it’s _his_. This is what he’d been afraid of.

This is what he’d meant when he’d hoped she wouldn’t ask too much of him.

Because he would. He would, and she wouldn’t even have to ask twice; he’s like a dog for her to sic on her enemies, waiting at her feet for the order. He’d do anything she asked. Kill for her. Kill them all. Wade so deep into blood and sin that he drowns in it, because he’s a damned man already and what is one more body to his name, really. It wouldn’t be hard to kill Walsh; he’s small, doesn’t pose much of a physical threat. He could snap his neck, easy. Strangle him. Stab or shoot him and bury his body where no one would ever find it.

He could. He _would_. If she asked.

If she wanted.

“I-” His voice breaks. He feels sick, nausea slithering around inside him like a serpent, making his stomach lurch. “You can’t… you can’t ask me to go back to that place, I-” He shakes his head, something like a sob bubbling up in his chest, but he holds it back, choking it down. “That place ain’t normal. It’s fucked up. Once you’re there you’re not the same. Not a person. A… thing. I was there, for so long. And now I’m gettin’ better. You, Bon… you helped me come back. But if I go there again…” He drifts off, meeting her eyes. “If I go there again I’m not gonna be able to come back.”

Laurel’s shoulders droop, in disappointment. But she doesn’t voice that disappointment. She just listens.

“So don’t-” Again, his voice dies, suddenly. Cracks and malfunctions, for a moment, before he recovers it. “Please don’t ask me to do that.”

Silence. Then, she gives a look of grim understanding.

“I’m sorry,” is all she whispers, turning back towards him, nearly curling up against him. She sounds so sad, suddenly. So small.

He doesn’t tell her it’s okay. He doesn’t say he forgives her. He doesn’t say anything at all. He just holds her to him like that, like a drowning man clinging to his last lifeline, for God knows how long; minutes or hours or days. They’re all they have, now – the two of them. Him and her, everything else gone to shit around them.

Frank doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say he forgives her, even though he does. He’d forgive her anything. Even if she put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger. Blew his brains out. Slit his throat and watched him bleed.

Any of it. He’d forgive her _all_ of it.

All Frank does, after, is hold her, as she fades into the darkness surrounding them. As he fades along with her. They fade together, wasting away and leaving their bodies until their bodies no longer feel like they really exist in any tangible, physical way. Like they’ve been absorbed somewhere. Fused together into one; one mass of pain and suffering and broken pieces.

She doesn’t need to be held. He’s very much aware of that. She’s so strong and she never has, but he does it anyway.

It’s all he can do, now.


	6. VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I steal a line from How to Be Single to stick in this chapter? … Maybe. Sue me. If you can pick it out I'll give you bonus points which really don't mean anything but you'll... get them anyway.
> 
> This is also fairly fluffy(ish). Or at least one of the least sad chapters in this fic. Enjoy y'all!!

Laurel isn’t sad anymore, after that night. She’s just… angry.

She’s resentful and angry at the world and closed-off, building up some invisible wall around herself that Frank can’t seem to figure out how to dismantle, in some distant place he can’t reach. It’s not temporary anger. Not the kind that comes and goes, not some transitory state.

She’s become an angry person. Someone he no longer really knows.

But still _her_. She’s still Laurel, even angry and grieving as she is, and it’s hard to love her at times when he’s still struggling to understand her, but he does. He re-learns how to love her day by day, all over again, love all her anger, love her even when she lashes out at him for no reason at all; love and respect her and give her space when she needs it.

She’s still Laurel. He still can’t stop loving her. It’s a reflex, same as breathing.

Some time passes. Weeks, Frank thinks, though he’s stopped measuring time in conventional increments. It’s easiest to measure by months, by the inches of her belly as it swells, growing rounded and heavier, not enormous on her petite frame, but still six months gone and big enough. She seems oddly detached to her pregnancy, somehow. Like it’s happening to someone else, not her. Like it isn’t her baby and she doesn’t know how to love it, can’t remember how to love anything at all after so much hurt.

Connor skips town, after that night. Frank doesn’t know where. Back to Michigan, he thinks he overhears Michaela say. Back home and no one knows why; no one except them. Frank is grateful. It’s easier for Laurel, like this. Easier for her with him gone – if _easy_ is even still a thing at this point.

_Easy_ may not be attainable, after everything. But he’s going to try his damnedest to get them somewhere closer to _normal_.

So he does just that: tries his damnedest.

He checks out stacks upon stacks of cheesy pregnancy books from the library and pores over them. Some of them are annoying and preachy, like the author might as well be writing the damn baby bible, but he’s successful in getting Laurel to peruse a few of them – though she loses interest quickly. He invites the others over for a sad little makeshift baby shower – a few months too soon, maybe, but he figures it doesn’t matter – with an equally sad, lopsided little cake courtesy of Michaela and a depressingly small number of attendees. It probably ends up being more depressing than anything, in hindsight. But he tries.  

_Tries_ is the operative word here.

He buys a crib from Ikea and builds it in her bedroom, and it takes damn near ten years to finish what with their shitty picture-only instructions but eventually he succeeds, only for it to fall into a useless heap a few minutes later. He insists on rubbing her feet, whenever they’re sitting idly together. Makes stupid jokes. Talks about names and comes up with lists. Only wanting her to smile, laugh. Give him something.

He doesn’t know if it’s working. From what he can tell, it isn’t. Laurel isn’t happy; she isn’t buying into his little fairytale, but hasn’t remarked on it yet. Frank doesn’t know who he’s kidding, really, pretending to be normal. _Playing house_ , Laurel had called it, and he thinks that’s a very apt descriptor of what he’s doing.

And he doesn’t even need to get to _normal_. He doesn’t think there’s any such thing for them, now.

Fuck _normal_. He’ll settle for just _better_.

He disappears for an hour or so one afternoon, and returns hauling a large cardboard box through the door, straining underneath its weight. Laurel is sitting on the couch when he does, feet propped up on a pillow, and gives him a quizzical, almost suspicious stare when she sees him drop it on the floor in the middle of the living room.

“What’s that?”

“All right, get ready for this,” he announces, smirking, as he bends down and starts to rummage through its contents: a modestly-sized army of stuffed animals that squeak, and rattles, and shape puzzles and toy musical instruments with near-dead batteries that break into a grating, high-pitched chorus of song when he bumps them. It’s a violent assault of color on his corneas, but he soldiers on like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen, almost too enthusiastic. “We hit the _motherload_ of baby toys.”

Laurel stands and crosses the room, coming to a stop beside the box. “What is all this?”

“Asked my ma if she could give me some of our old stuff from when we were little,” he explains. “And she asked my aunts and uncles and cousins. And they all chipped in, because us Delfinos hump like bunnies, so now we got…” He pulls out what looks like an ancient dried-up can of yellow Playdoh, and scoffs. “Well, we got this. Little guy’s gonna _love_ this.”

Laurel is silent for a moment, just watching. Then, she shakes her head. “What’re you doing?”

She doesn’t sound happy; far from it. She sounds upset, almost mad. The question catches him off guard, and Frank climbs to his feet, confusion flickering in his eyes.

“What do you mean? We needed stuff, we hardly have anything-”

“Not that,” she says, furrowing her brow, folding her arms above her belly. The closer he looks the more unsettled she seems; disquieted, by the sight of all the things he’s brought her, or maybe simply the fact that _he’s_ the one who brought them. “What’re you _doing_? Why’re you… pretending you care?”

The question wounds him. Frank shakes his head, the smile withering on his lips.

“What?”

“This baby’s not yours,” she says, shaking her head. “Not your obligation. Or your family’s. You don’t have to… You don’t have to pity me.” She gulps, lowering her eyes. “You don’t have to do this.”

“If this is too much, I can take it back, I-”

“You don’t get it,” she scoffs, and his heart drops. “I-it’s not about the _toys_ , Frank, it’s – You don’t… even have to be here. Do all this. The crib. The baby shower. The books. I never asked you to do any of that.”

He takes a step closer, arms slack at his sides, all numb and full of pins and needles. “I was just tryin’ to help-”

“I don’t _need_ your help!” she cries, so loud it startles him, before going quiet and sucking in a breath. She must rip it straight out of his lungs because he loses the ability to do the same, his airways all contracting and closing up. “I can… I can do this alone. And why would you wanna stay anyway? Take care of some other guy’s kid?”

There’s a blockage in his throat, suddenly, keeping him from swallowing. This is the blow-up that had probably been inevitable all along, he realizes, stomach going sour. The culmination of his efforts to be normal. Play house. He should’ve known better.

This had always been lurking just beneath the surface. Ugly and hidden and brewing, and now it’s all coming up at once, inescapable.

“I don’t care if it’s not mine, you know that-”

“You _should_ care,” Laurel asserts, jaw clenched. “You should care a-and I don’t know why you don’t!”

“’Cause I love you,” he raises his voice, the words bursting out of their own volition before he has time to stop them. They’ve been bottled up so long that he doesn’t know how he’s kept them to himself all these months. “It don’t matter to me if the kid’s mine or not. I love you. I just wanna be… with you, and him, I-”

“How much did you love me when you left me, huh?”

He freezes.

The words split him open, gut him, like a bullseye fired right at his chest with precisely the right ammunition. Like a viper with the perfect concoction of venom pumped into his veins. She’s always known just what to say to make him shut the fuck up, to destroy him, keep him in check, and she does it right then – and she has every right to. Every right in the world.

She’s right. He left her. He doesn’t get to blabber on about his undying devotion because he _left her_. They haven’t mentioned those long bloody months apart much, since the fire. Everything else had seemed more important – but he should’ve known better than to think Laurel would forget, forgive him for that.

He left her. He can tell her he loves her and mean it, but that doesn’t change what he did. Doesn’t change a single goddamn thing.

Frank flounders, for a moment. The only word he comes up with is her name: “Laurel-”

“You left me,” she hisses, eyes glassy now. “So you don’t get to talk about how much you _love_ me.”

“I… never meant to-”

“You say you wanna be with me? Be there for this baby?” she cuts him off. “How do I know you’re not just gonna run again, Frank? When things get hard? You get… sick of taking care of a baby that isn’t yours? Staying up all night when he’s crying, or changing him, or feeding him, or…” She drifts off and looks at him, and suddenly the anger leeches out of her, replaced by sorrow. “You say you wanna be there. And maybe you mean it, right now. But… I can’t trust you to mean it forever.”

Something in him breaks. Splits clean in half like a bone, sends agony shooting through his body. He reaches out to her, but she steps back, coldly.

“Laurel… I-”

“Everyone always leaves. My dad. My mom. You. Wes…” Her voice catches on his name. “Everyone just leaves, in the end.”

“ _I_ won’t,” he promises, praying she can see the sincerity in his eyes, so that she knows he does. Knows he means it with every cell in his body, down to the tiniest, most inconsequential atom, so much he aches with it. “I won’t leave again. Leave either of you. _Ever_. I promise.”

“Promises are easy. They’re just words.” Laurel gives a bitter, rough burst of a laugh, wiping at her cheeks. “They’re really fucking easy.”

She doesn’t want his words, he realizes. There’re none he can give her now to convince her, after what he’s done; he fractured her trust when he left, broke it beyond repair, and the cracks run too deep for her to ignore, too deep to patch over with cement. Cement won’t do shit; it’s their foundation he’s destroyed, the foundation of their relationship, their love, whatever it once was. He’s destroyed it now. Maybe probably forever. She doesn’t want his words, and he can swear up and down and on the bible and on his grandpop’s grave and it won’t sway her, not the tiniest bit.

“You’re just gonna leave, like the rest of them,” Laurel says, plainly, like she’s stating a fact; an inevitability. Like his eventual leaving is the same as the sky being blue or water being wet. “So go. Just… just get out, Frank.”

He furrows his brow. “Huh?”

“Go. Take your stuff… and go,” she orders, softly, like a dog she’s telling to _get_ , but no – not just that.

Like he’s a hopelessly devoted puppy she’s trying to drive off. One that refuses to leave, no matter how many stones and twigs and harsh words she hurls at it.

“I don’t-” he chokes out, shaking his head. “I don’t wanna go.”

“I’m giving you an out,” she says, voice steel-hard and just as cutting. She gestures weakly in the direction of the door. “Letting you off the hook. Now’s your chance.”

“I don’t want a damn _out_ , Laurel, I wanna _be_ here.”

“Yeah, well,” she breathes, meeting his eyes; frigid and merciless but so unimaginably _hurt_. “I don’t want you here. Not if you’re just gonna leave. I’m not gonna wait around for you to hurt me, again.”

“I’m not gonna leave,” Frank urges. “How many times I gotta say that before you-”

“Just _go_!”

It’s a cry, this time, loud enough to all but paralyze him; paralyze him with all her venom. She’s glaring at him, eyes burning, glittering with all that cool blue anger – to cover up how wounded she is, he thinks. Hide it from view like a haphazardly placed Band Aid. Like the skin graft they’d pasted over her burn. She wants him gone, and one look at her is all it takes for Frank to realize that. She wants him gone, doesn’t want to give him the chance to hurt her. Wants to hurt _him_ before he can do the same to her again.

Strike first. Strike back.

He could think she’s being unreasonable, tell her as much, but he understands. After everything he’s done to her, all the intricate ways he’d broken her, fucked her up by leaving, been just another abandonment in a long, long line of them for her… He understands, and that’s what keeps his protests at bay, makes him swallow them down. For a long while he just stands there, stupidly, awkward and lumbering, feeling like an idiot. A stupid fucking _idiot_ for having any optimism at all, about this, about Laurel, ever. About fixing what they’d once had.

There’s no fixing things shattered into a million pieces. Sometimes it’s better to simply let them go. Acknowledge something as a lost cause.

But they’re _not_ a lost cause. He refuses to believe that. They’re broken, wheezing, just barely breathing, on life support. But they’re not _lost_.

Frank thinks about protesting, saying something else, but he decides against it; Laurel has made up her mind, and once Laurel Castillo has made up her mind she’s not to be swayed. At some point, after finally remembering how to move his muscles and regain basic motor functions, he plods his way into the bedroom, dragging his duffle bag out from underneath her bed and packing away what little belongings he has here; he’d always kept them to a minimum, never wanting her to feel like he was invading. Overstepping his bounds and overstaying his welcome.

He _has_ overstayed his welcome. She’s made that abundantly clear.

After he finishes he steps back out into the living room, and finds Laurel standing right where he’d left her near the door, eyes narrowed, watching him warily. No sorrow, to see him go, and why _would_ she be sad about that. She wants it. Wants him gone, out of her life, somewhere he can’t hurt her again. This was never his place anyway.

He walked out of her life, once. He’d been a fool to think he could just saunter back in without repercussions.

Frank stops at the door before he goes, though. He stops, and turns and looks at her standing there, stance guarded, arms folded over her swelling stomach. Her back is straightened, shoulders squared, feet placed firmly apart. Fury in her eyes. She’s lit from behind by the sunlight streaming in through the window. She looks so beautiful. Cruel, and beautiful.

She’s hurting him. Turning a knife in his stomach. But she’s so _strong_ and suddenly he’s so irrationally, ridiculously proud of her – even if she’s damn near killing him.

“I’m not leavin’, y’know,” he tells her, voice low. Gaze tender, resigned. He understands. He hates this, hates leaving her. But he understands. “You’re pushin’ me away.”

He leaves her, with that. He stops himself from looking back.

 

~

 

Two days.

It only lasts two days, not long, but long enough. He leaves, driving to another shitty motel a few exits off the highway; accommodations he’s become far too familiar with these past few months, decidedly unglamorous but sufficient for his needs, and cheap. He’s starting to think he should get frequent-flyer perks.

Maybe upgrade to a mattress sans bed bugs, for once.

Two days he spends sitting around there, doing nothing because he has nothing _to_ do. He gets drunk, the first night, because he hasn’t gotten shitfaced since all but moving in with Laurel, and he doesn’t mind but he does miss it, a little, when things get tough. When he’s partial to numbing his reality instead of actually experiencing it.

Two days of suspended animation, like he’s frozen in time, not progressing forward, not _re_ gressing back. Just staying still, perfectly stationary. Sometimes those intrusive thoughts return before he can fend them off, gnawing at the corners of his mind. Thoughts of ending it. Doing what Annalise told him to do. They never last long, but they do come. They’re always there.

On the third, she shows up at his door.

He hears the familiar rhythm of her knocks like Morse code and he knows it’s her, and though his heart shoots into his throat like a firecracker and he has no clue how she found him, he’s not altogether surprised. She’d wanted him to go, just as much as she _hadn’t_ wanted him to go. Wanted to teach him a lesson, and he’d probably deserved it. He pulls open the door without glancing through the peephole, and there she is before him standing in the night, clad in her coat, a look of remorse in her eyes, cheeks glowing red from the cold.

“Hey,” he greets, no judgement, no anger. He’s so glad to see her that he can’t bring himself to care about the rest.

She almost, almost smiles.

Almost.

“Hi.”

Frank steps aside, and she enters, shrugging off her coat, leaving her only in a striped pink sweater and jeans, and he tries to keep his eyes off her stomach, on her face, but finds that he can’t, for some reason. He never can, these days. It shouldn’t fascinate him like it does, to watch her grow and change and blossom. It isn’t his child doing this to her; he had no part in any of this, but he’s captivated still, beyond sense, beyond reason. Captivated in the same mystifying way he’d been by the sonogram, that first time he’d seen her son.

She’s so beautiful. So beautiful, and _here_.

“How’d you find me?” he asks, closing the door and sliding the deadbolt into it.

“I had Oliver ping your phone,” she explains, coming to a stop over by the bed. “And then I asked at the desk about a hot guy with a beard. The girl seemed to remember you pretty well. You must’ve… made quite the impression.”

He grins. “You always did know how to find me.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, softly, shifting her weight from one leg to another. “I guess I did.”

Silence lingers in the air for a moment, and finally Laurel sighs, repentant.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kicked you out. I was wrong.”

“Nah.” He shakes his head, stepping closer to her. “You were right. ‘Bout me leavin’.” He pauses, gaze and words equally heavy. “’Bout everything.”

“Frank…”

“I left. I left you, and… there’s no way I can make that right. I hurt you.” His throat locks up, at the thought. “But I wanna be there. I’m not pretendin’ to care about this baby, Laurel, I do.” He pauses, meets her eyes, and she’s looking at him softly, now. More softly than she’s looked at him in ages. “I care about him, and I care about you. And I get it, if you don’t trust me anymore. I don’t deserve it, everything I’ve done…” He shakes the thought away. “I wanna be better. You made me better.”

“I’m not here to be your redemption. Me or him.”

“I know. I know that,” he says, cursing himself, even though she doesn’t seem angry. “But I want to be there, Laurel. So don’t shut me out. Please.”

A moment passes. There’s still doubt, in her eyes, like this right here, this moment, this crossroads is a trust fall and she’s not quite sure that he’ll catch her if she gives in, goes tumbling backward blindly. He could be a coward. He could fuck it up and let her hit the ground – but he won’t. You don’t get second chances, and he has something here that’s maybe, just maybe, some fucked up, cobbled together semblance of a second chance – even though he’s the least deserving person in the world.

She shouldn’t be here with him, but she is. Time after time, over and over, like they’re tied together by some invisible cord, never able to escape each other, bound by a gravitational force. Like the setting sun and the horizon line, always fated to collide one way or other.

He’s bad for her. He’s so bad for her.

But he can try to be good. It’s all he can do.

She nods, at last, her shoulders drooping, giving in. “Okay.”

Silence, again. But it’s familiar and warm, and Laurel lets her arms hang at her sides after it passes, relaxing.

“Come back with me,” she tells him. “Let’s get out of this place.”

“It’s late,” he answers, walking over, standing so close he ought to be touching her, but he doesn’t dare, doesn’t think he should be the one to cross that line; if it happens, tonight, it has to be her. “It’s a long drive back. Just stay with me tonight.” She looks ready to protest, and he doesn’t blame her, given the series of suspicious stains on the carpet and duvet, but he opens his mouth before she can. “Let’s stay here.”

Laurel hesitates, but eventually gives in and nods. She changes out of her clothes, and he gives her one of his flannels to sleep in; a routine that feels so familiar, one they’ve done a million times before. Thanks to her stomach it’s not as baggy on her as it used to be, bulging out slightly in the front, but she seems content enough with it and slides under the covers, and doesn’t raise a protest when he does the same. They haven’t shared a bed once all these months; he’d taken the couch, hadn’t dared to venture too close, and Laurel had never suggested they share hers. But it feels so easy, going back to this; this little corner of the world it feels like they’d never left.

They aren’t lying very close. There’s some distance between them, even though the heater in the motel barely works and Frank wouldn’t mind sharing body heat to compensate for the fact. For a while they just lay there together, neither really making an attempt to sleep, or do anything other than lie there with their eyes open, looking at each other with no particular burden to fill the silence.

Laurel is the one to reach over, eventually. She takes his hand and starts to play idly with his fingers on top of the blanket, lacing them with hers then unlacing them, and it’s only then that she speaks.

“I tried so hard, y’know,” she murmurs, languid drawl of sleep in her voice. “To find you after you left. I even went to my dad.”

She never told him that. Frank frowns, guilt going solid in his stomach like a peach pit. “You did?”

“Mmm hmm,” Laurel hums. “He found you, in Coalport. I hid it from Annalise. But after Bonnie, before I could get to you… you just ran, again. I called. I called every day.” She’s sullen now. So sad, because of him, and he hates himself for it. “You never answered.”

“I didn’t want you to see me like that,” he confesses, as he stares at their joined fingers, the innocence of their clasped hands in the pale moonlight. “Wasn’t me. Don’t know who I was. I didn’t want you around me. I was…” He swallows. “I was in a bad place. Real bad.”

“I know,” is all she says, and she does. She knows what he did and there’s no point drudging up those literal skeletons in his closet because he thinks of them every day already, and suspects she does too. How could she not.

There’s no forgiveness, for everything he’s done. But there is this.

There is _them._

“I was so mad at you when you left,” Laurel undertones, eyelids drooping dangerously low. “I still am.”

“I’m never leavin’ you again. I promise. I never shoulda. I was so…” He drifts off, frowning. “I was so stupid, to leave you at all.”

She grins, a little. “Yeah, that was pretty dumb.”

“I meant it, though,” he mumbles, solemn. “When I said I wanna be there for you. You and him. I know he’s not mine. I’m not… not tryin’ to make him mine. Make this into somethin’ it’s not. I just wanna be with you.” _However you’ll have me. However you want me._

_If you want me at all._

She doesn’t say anything, for a moment, before she hums again. “Okay.”

There’re multitudes contained in that word alone. That word is far too full of weight for how pithy it is. _Okay_ , she wants him with her. _Okay_ , she’ll let him be in this baby’s life, in whatever capacity she sees fit. _Okay_ , she believes him when he says he won’t leave again. Okay. Just _okay_.

It means so much at once and he doesn’t know how to decode it all. He figures he can live without that, tonight.

“He’s kicking,” Laurel remarks, with a yawn. “Wanna feel?”

His mouth goes dry, all the saliva sucked out of it. He almost forgets how to nod. She’s never asked him to do that before; she’s kept those moments private, kept her son private, hidden away inside her, for her and only her. But eventually he remembers how to nod and does so, gaping dumbly, and watches as she turns over onto her back, peeling down the blanket and undoing just enough buttons on the flannel to allow his hand to slip inside, directly over her belly. She slides her hand in with his and guides him, searching for the point where the kicking is at its strongest, until finally, finally she does.

She holds it there once she has, just to the right of her belly button, her hand atop his, and little by little the stirring beneath his palm fades into Frank’s awareness, his touch receptors awakening. They’re quick little jabs, surprisingly sharp and strong, like the baby has detected a stranger’s hand there and is trying to bat him off Laurel’s stomach; already a tiny guard dog, protective of his mother. The world around him seems to slow to an almost disorienting speed, fade into nothing, until all he’s really conscious of are those haphazard, insistent kicks, the baby demanding it be recognized and remembered.

Strong. So strong. Tiny and world-shattering, shifting the axis of the earth. Of his earth. Their earth.

Laurel is watching him, a look of sleepy contentment on her face. It’s the first time she’s let him in, truly let him share in the baby’s existence. Share this moment, which she’s never shared with anyone else. And he certainly shouldn’t be the one she’s sharing it with, and he knows that perfect well. He’s sure she’s thinking that too.

He shouldn’t be here, but he is. And he loves her. And he loves this impossible, improbable, unseen creature inside her too, simply by virtue of the fact that it’s a part of her. How could he not.

How could he not love anything that’s a part of Laurel.

“Wow…” is all he can come up with, gulping heavily. “That’s…”

“Annoying, is what it is,” she scoffs, closing her eyes with a sigh but leaving her hand closed over his on top of her stomach. “Keeps me up for hours, at night.”

“I was gonna say amazing,” he utters, lowly, gaze reverent. “He’s so real.”

She opens her eyes and glances over at him, giving a laugh. “He’s real all right. And already training for his career as a soccer star, apparently.”

“Got a good pair of legs. Means he’s strong.”

“Yeah,” she says, and her voice is strained suddenly, the words catching in her throat. “Yeah, he’s gonna need to be strong.” _We both are_.

She doesn’t say the words aloud, but he hears them. He understands.

The kicking dies down after a minute longer, and Frank reluctantly draws his hand away from the heat of her belly though he’d prefer to keep it there. Shield him. Shield _her_ , from everything in his power. They’re closer, now, Laurel almost nestled in at his side, still lying on her back, and after a moment she rolls over so that she’s facing him, tucking her knees up against her body as much as she can manage.

She drifts off, a while later, five or ten or twenty minutes. He can hear the distinctive rattle of sleep in her breaths, the way those breaths slow into long, deep pulls. Frank doesn’t feel much inclined to sleep. To miss even a moment of this precious time with her. He’s missed so much already.

He doesn’t know what makes him do it. It’s stupid. _He’s_ stupid.

But he’s always been stupid, too dumb for his own good, and before Frank can think better of it he’s lowering himself slightly, sliding down the bed until he’s eye-level with her belly, a tiny hint of her bare flesh exposed where she’d unbuttoned the flannel. He begins softly, voice barely a whisper, so as not to wake Laurel.

“Hey, little man,” he greets, a smile curling his lips. “How’s it goin’ in there?” He pauses, because he feels like he _should_ pause, _would_ pause in a normal conversation, to await an answer. But no answer comes; no kick, no nothing, and he’s not surprised, and he’s also not sure exactly what he was expecting. “I know you dunno who I am. Name’s Frank. Uncle Frank, I guess. I don’t know what we are to each other yet. But… I wanted you to hear my voice. Get acquainted. I hope I get to meet you, when you come out. If I’m still around by then. Maybe, uh, put in a good word for me. Y’know. With the big lady upstairs.” He looks up at the slumbering Laurel, and smirks. “Don’t tell her I called her the big lady, though. She’ll have my head.”

His voice is low, almost conspiratorial. He has the urge to laugh.

Look at him. Conspiring with a fetus.

“Keep getting’ strong, okay?” he murmurs. “And go easy on your ma. She’s had it hard. We both have. So tone down the soccer practice, I’ll teach you for real when you’re out. I just… gotta learn stuff about soccer first, I guess.” Frank smiles, again, wider, and it bursts out of him, folding out onto his face before he’s even aware of it. He’s happy. He hasn’t been happy like this so long. “And maybe don’t tell your ma about our little chat, huh? I dunno what she thinks of me, anymore, sometimes. But I love her.” He swallows, licks his lips. “Just like I’m gonna love you.”

Above him, suddenly, there’s rustling. Laurel stirs, her brow furrowing, and she makes a muffled, sleepy sound of irritation.

“Frank?” she mumbles, caught somewhere between sleep and consciousness, not awake enough to hear what he’d been saying but awake enough to recognize he’d been saying _something_. She frowns into the pillow. “Who’re you talking to?”

“Nobody,” he soothes, easily, and maneuvers himself back up by her side. “Go back to sleep.”


	7. VII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of an early update!! I felt like updating and I had the time so.... here we r.
> 
> This chapter deals with some pretty disturbing themes which I’ve tagged accordingly, under 'disturbing themes' and 'violent thoughts', but I wanted to give y'all a heads up here too. None of it is real (in dream-verse/thoughts only) but it’s still pretty heavy and warrants a warning.

So, he doesn’t get _easy_. And he doesn’t get _normal_. Maybe he doesn’t even really get _better_.

But he does get _okay_ – and if there’s anything Frank has learned these past six months, it’s to take what he can get.

They settle into that same old familiarity they’d had before. He still isn’t moved in officially – that’s a line Laurel seems hesitant to cross – but he’s cooking her dinner every night and sleeping in her bed and keeping his toothbrush next to hers and working his routine around her, so he figures he might as well be. There’s no kissing, no touching. None of that. Neither of them are anywhere near ready for that.

Neither of them will probably be ready for that for a long, long time.

Frank thinks it should bother him, maybe. Maybe before the months he’d spent away from her it would’ve, but it doesn’t, now, not at all. He’s more content than he can ever say to lay by her side every night, washed in the tide of her breathing, letting it draw him in and out. Watch her belly grow and swell. Rub her feet and run to the store at three AM to satiate her cravings and let her scream at him when her hormones fire out of control. Just _be with_ her, even if he isn’t with her. Being in her presence is enough. Just occupying the same space is enough.

He gets _okay_. But by now he should know there’s no such thing as _okay_ for someone like him. _Okay_ is a fucking fantasy.

He gets _okay_ , and then the dreams start.

 

~

 

He’s not sure where he is at first.

His eyes open and everything has gone grayscale, not black with the night or gold with the dawn; some tertiary time period in the middle, fuzzy like an old movie. He’s in a room, in a bed – it looks vaguely like his own, at his old apartment. No sound, except for some distant buzz, like white noise jackhammering in his eardrums, loud as the droning of insects. His body feels abnormally heavy, uncoordinated, but somehow he hauls himself to his feet and pads his way out of the room, down the hallway.

Being led by something. _To_ something.

There’s a room there wasn’t, before, at the very end of the hall, the door slightly ajar; a grey light pouring through the crack. The walls around him feel sentient; inhaling and exhaling, rocking him like a ship churning on the waves. Disorienting. He stumbles his way to the door and nudges it open, and it’s empty save for a queen-sized bed with no sheets on it, just a mattress.

There, seated cross-legged on top of it, is Laurel.

Her back is facing him but he knows it’s her, can tell by her hair, and he has some odd, omnipotent higher level of awareness that tells him he would know it was her even if he couldn’t recognize any part of her at all. She’s sitting still, still as stone. Utterly motionless. He can’t see her breathing, and he doesn’t think she is. She’s just there, like one of those sad angel statues, cloaked in sorrow, but she’s not grey like everything else; she’s a drop of vibrant color, almost blinding.

Then, he draws closer. And he sees her.

One of her hand is curved around the underside of her belly, the other resting on top, and she’s bigger than she has been, her stomach swelling out on her thin frame, stretching her skin. Growing. He thinks he can _see_ it growing by the second, pulsating with life. She’s just staring down at it, unmoving, something like a grin flickering on her lips. Her hand on top moves, ever so slightly, stroking with her fingers across the bulging skin, caressing the child within.

Her eyes are warm. She looks happy. Loving and happy and so unfathomably beautiful his heart and chest and throat and lungs all coil up in tandem.

He blinks.

She’s bleeding.

Bleeding from two slashed wrists. Bleeding from a stab wound in her stomach and one just below her breast. She’s still seated like she was before, like a grotesque Buddha, but now the color has washed out of her and her skin is a sickly grey. There are bruises on her neck. Her eyes are black pits, dull, absorbing light, no irises, just huge, inky pupils. There’s so much blood flowing from her he could drown in it, but it isn’t grey.

It’s red. It’s painted the blank walls around her like a Pollock, seeped into the mattress beneath her. She doesn’t seem to notice.

There’s a scream of horror in his throat; bottled up, burning his lungs like noxious gas, begging to be released. But he can’t. A knot is sealing it up. Something is choking him.

Laurel. _Laurel! God, Laurel, no no no nonono-_

He can’t say her name either – but a moment passes, and he blinks again and it’s all been washed away. The blood, the demonic blackness in her eyes, the bruises on her throat. And she’s fine.

She notices him, finally, a smile lighting up her face. Starts to open her mouth to greet him, and-

He launches himself at her.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing and yet at the same time he’s completely aware, so agonizingly, painfully aware. Something is controlling him, like a parasite in his brain, some disease. His hands are not his own – but they _are_ and before he realizes it he’s shoving her backward and climbing atop her and wrapping them around her delicate throat; brutal, merciless. They feel like cold, robotic extensions of himself, programmed to kill.

Hitman – that’s what he is, what she’d called him, what Annalise and Sam made him. His dull fingernails dig into her skin, and she thrashes about, thrashing wildly, madly beneath him. He pins her down, not paying any mind to her stomach even though he’s crushing it beneath his weight. Crushing the baby to death.

Crushing it like he’s crushing her fucking throat.

Blink again. Blink again, and he’s not there anymore. He’s outside in the humid summer air on the roof of some building, and he’s not a thinking, cognizant creature right then, but he uses what’s left of his brain to come to the realization that this is the roof of the sorority house, and he’s been here before. Lila Stangard’s sorority.

Look down. Laurel is Lila. And he’s strangling her, again.

Her blue eyes are bulging, dimming, blue leeching out of the irises and leaving only colorless grey in its wake. She’s clawing at his cold leather hands and wheezing, gasping through her crushed airway, and he wants to stop, wants it so desperately, and can’t, can’t even bring himself to care. Rage is bubbling in his blood, boiling his brain, pumping through his veins. Lava is coming up through his pores like a million tiny fissures. He just watches, impassively, stone-cold, as her fight grows weaker and weaker, and those panicked gasps die down, and-

Flash. Her face to Lila’s then back again. Red hair and green eyes – eyes pleading for the life of her baby. Then back to Laurel’s eyes. Laurel pleading for the life of her baby.

Either way the story ends the same.

Either way he kills them both.

Blink again, and now _Laurel_ is above him, and _her_ hands are choking him with seemingly superhuman strength. She has that same unrecognizable snarl on her face she’d had the night she beat Connor half to death, that lust for blood. She pushes harder, harder still, and by all logic and reason he should be able to throw her little body off but he can’t; she’s so heavy. Her stomach looms over him, ballooning out. He thinks the child inside must be thirsting for blood. His blood.

Blink again. Now it’s him back on top. He’s throttling her, and he’s so strong and she’s so small, and he can feel the cartilage of her windpipe crumpling beneath the pressure of his hands, and her mouth is moving like she’s trying to form words, last pleas, but she can’t, and he doesn’t give a fuck. About her or her baby.

It’s not like it was before. He didn’t want to do this before, do this to Lila. He had to.

He _wants_ to do this now. He _likes_ it.

Lila, again. Then Laurel. Lila. Laurel. Lila. Laurel – until their names and faces blur together, red hair and brown and blue eyes and green, and they might as well be the same person, and it doesn’t matter because they’re both dead. He killed them both.

Squeezing. Snapping her neck. She’s not fighting now. She’s gone, limbs limp and skin bone-white, the child slipping away with her. Withering in her belly without oxygen. He wants to scream. He wants to scream his throat raw but he can’t.

Instead he jams a pistol up underneath his chin and blows his fucking brains out like Annalise had told him to.

 

~

 

The dreams. Dream, singular. It’s only the one.

It’s only _that_ one.

Night after night after night, recurring, like he’s caught in a hell he can’t escape; the worst hell he could imagine, personally tailored to him and penned by his demons. He doesn’t know what spurs them so suddenly, but for the first few days he can explain them away, dismiss Laurel’s concerns when he wakes up terrified, thrashing around, soaked with ice-cold sweat, tangled in the sheets. Shivering, with the feeling of crushing her throat so fresh on his palms. So real.

Every night he strangles her to death, as she lies peacefully beside him. Every night he kills her.

He can’t tell her. He keeps it to himself. It terrifies him, makes him sick to his bones, to think that maybe this is his subconscious trying to tell him something, speaking of some hidden desire buried inside him, working its way piecemeal, bit by bit, to the surface. Faulty programming.

Maybe he wants to kill her. Maybe he _wants_ to do that and he just doesn’t know it yet. Maybe he’d liked doing it to Lila.

Maybe he is a psychopath after all. Gets off on it.

He doesn’t, though. He must not. He spends those days feeling physically, almost violently ill, and every time he closes his eyes he sees her face, the bulging whites of pleading eyes, choking gasps, those silent supplications. He spends those days fending off those intrusive, unbidden thoughts, like a plague of locusts on his brain, crawling in the corners, laying their eggs and multiplying there. They flare up, now and then, suddenly. When he’s just looking at her, when they’re just cooking together, sitting together. Memories of the dream. The knowledge that he could reenact that dream, right then, at any second, if he wanted.

Maybe he secretly hates her and the baby, wants them both dead. Maybe his goddamn psychiatrist didn’t help him one bit.

He’d been doing good, doing so much better. He thought he’d left that dark place back at Annalise’s house and watched it burn to the ground the night of the fire, but something, inexplicably, has roped him back the closer he’s gotten to Laurel, the more her stomach grows, the more _okay_ things appear on the surface. He’s fucked up and he knows it, and he shouldn’t be here, playing at normalcy. Playing house with her when he has enough blood on his hands to drown him. Drown all three of them.

Frank manages to shrug her off, the first few nights – but one night, after she’s finally had enough, Laurel corners him.

He wakes with screams dying in his throat, her name withering on his lips as _she_ dies beneath his hands, lungs burning, throat crushed. Her eyes are dotted with little pinpricks of red, broken blood vessels, from the force of his hold on her, but when Frank’s eyes fly open the whites of hers are strikingly clear, shining through the darkness.

“Frank? Frank, wake _up_!”

She’s shaking him, shaking him hard, yanking him out of that fragile liminal state between slumber and consciousness. Everything was black, and Laurel was gasping for breath but now she’s saying his name, so clearly. He blinks, squinting and feeling around on the sheets beneath him. She’s at his side, eyes hazy with sleep, hair messy, but breathing. Safe. Not dead or in the process of dying.

She’s safe. He didn’t do it. He _wouldn’t_.

He could.

“You were dreaming. Again,” she says, like he doesn’t already know. “You kept… saying my name.”

That’s a new development – he doesn’t think he’s done that before, to his knowledge, and it seems to trouble her. He opens his mouth, starts to form some semblance of a word, an explanation, but ultimately lets it fall shut, jaw locking into a clench. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, peeling back the sheets and swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

“Sorry,” is all he mutters, finding his voice. “Didn’t mean t’ wake you up.”

“What was it about?”

His back is turned to her but he can feel the curiosity in her words, feel her eyes burning into him from behind. Strangling her. Choking her. Killing her.

He can’t tell her.

“Nothin’,” he grunts, and beats his muscles into submission long enough for them to get him upright, onto his feet. “Be back in a sec.”

“Frank-”

He’s out the door and down the hall to the bathroom before she can finish whatever she’d started to say. He leaves the door open behind him, bending over the sink and splashing cold water onto his face, in hopes he can shock the memories out of his brain. He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and his skin is pale, eyes sunken in with bags beneath them from the shitty night’s sleep he’s been getting since the dreams started. He’d gotten thinner from his months on the lam too, never really regained the weight.

He blinks and he’s a skeleton. He’s Death.

Frank braces himself against the sink, leaning his weight onto his arms, bowing his head. Droplets of water fall from his newly-wet hair and cheeks, plop into the sink lightly. The cold porcelain grounds him to reality. He hopes it can keep him from slipping back into his prison of a mind, and it works for a little while as he stands there, sucking air into his lungs in large, greedy pulls. Trying to make himself breathe – but then he sees Laurel, hears her gasping, and stops again. Stops because he shouldn’t deserve to be breathing if she wasn’t. If Lila hadn’t when he’d killed her.

“Frank?”

He hadn’t heard her approach, but there she is suddenly, leaning against the doorway with her arms folded over her belly; her default stance, it seems, these days, innately protective of the child there. She’s eyeing him closely, though it’s hard to see in the darkness, illuminated only by a little LED nightlight glowing above the sink. She’s in silky blue pajama bottoms and a mismatched tank top which has ridden up slightly, allowing her underbelly to poke out beneath. He should look at her and think she’s beautiful – and she is.

But all he can see is her bleeding out. Bleeding everywhere.

“I’ll be a sec,” he manages, somehow, shaking his head and shaking the droplets of water free like a wet dog. “I’m, uh… I’m good.”

“This is the fourth time this week this’s happened.”

“It’s nothin’.”

“It’s _not_ nothing,” Laurel finally raises her voice and steps closer to him. He has no real route of escape; she’s boxed him in, backed him into a corner, and he thinks that was probably intentional on her part. There’s no running from this conversation, no matter how bad he wants to, and she lowers her voice but she’s still staring him down, unflappable. “They’re nightmares, right?”

He hesitates, then nods. She lets that sink in, for a moment.

“What happens?” He stays silent, avoiding her eyes like a guilty child. She moves closer still. “Tell me, Frank. Please.” Her voice drops to a half-whisper; she looks almost desperate, afraid of what could be terrifying him like this. “Please tell me.”

_Please tell me_. She looks like she had that night, the night he told her about Lila; that night she’d asked for all his _mostly bad things_ , all his darkness, so completely naïve and unaware of what she’d been getting herself into – and she doesn’t know now, either. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for; she doesn’t know that she won’t want the answer he gives her.

But he can’t lie to her, anymore. Not after doing it for so long. Not when she’s looking at him, big eyes boring into his, so earnest.

Those same eyes bulging wide, almost popping out of their sockets. Hands around her thin little neck.

Blink, and they’re gone.

“I killed you.”

He says it simply, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, and maybe it is. Maybe that’s the only certainty he can cling to: the fact that he’s a killer, a monster. There’s no flicker of emotion on her face, at first. She receives the news like it’s nothing at all, and then lowers her eyes, taking it in, turning it over in her hands, before looking back up at him pressing her lips into a line; a show of grim acceptance. She doesn’t seem surprised. He can’t read her at all, right then, but he can’t detect surprise, or horror, or shock. She seems grimly _un_ surprised, as a matter of fact.

He keeps going, though someone who wasn’t a fucking idiot would stop there. He needs to tell her everything. He’s aching to get it off his chest, confess to someone, repent the sins of his mind, and he does, cheeks burning hot with shame, body vibrating in its core with self-loathing and disgust and guilt.

“I killed you,” he repeats, swallowing thickly. “Every night. ‘S always the same. You’re Lila, on the roof. And I strangle you, and…” He can’t breathe. Something feels like it’s suffocating him. “I kill you. Kill the baby. Both of you.”

Any sane person would scream, order him out, back away in fear, but Laurel does none of those things. She simply holds his gaze, weary but hardened, and he won’t deny she looks troubled, but not nearly as troubled as she should. Her skin is bone, in the glow of the nightlight. As if she’s shed her old weaker one like a snake and bone has grown back in its place.

She doesn’t look disgusted. She doesn’t look afraid. She’s still just _looking_.

“And I wanna stop,” he chokes out, voice strained and tight. He has to yank every syllable out of his throat. “I wanna stop, so bad, every time, but I don’t want to. I wanna do it. I keep… havin’ it. Every night. And I’m scared. Scared it means I wanna hurt you.”

Laurel shakes her head, fierce certainty in her eyes. “You don’t want to hurt me.”

“You don’t-” He cuts himself off, cursing the tears in his eyes. Crying like a fucking child, is what he’s doing. He doesn’t _get_ to do this. Children don’t take lives the way he has. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do.”

She’s so sure of him. She feels so _safe_ with him and he can’t possibly fathom why. She sees good in him, where there isn’t any, not a single goddamn scrap. He’s always thought she was smart, observant, but God in the end she must be completely utterly _blind_.

“No you _don’t_ ,” he bites out, almost feral. Before she’d been the one trying to spook him and send him running, drive him off like an unwanted dog; now, Frank realizes, he’s doing the same to her. “You know who I am. You know what I did. To Lila. Her baby. I killed them.” He gulps, locks his eyes on hers miserably. “I’m dangerous. I could… I could hurt you.”

“You could,” Laurel acknowledges, “but you won’t.”

He shakes the words off, gritting his teeth. “You were right. When you kicked me out, before. I shoulda stayed gone. You’re not safe here, Laurel – you’re not safe around _me_. And don’t tell me you are. You’re _not_.”

She stands in silence, for a moment, considering that. Then-

“Have you ever wanted to hurt me?”

Frank sucks in a breath, choking back his tears, feeling the sickness churn in his gut as he feels himself crushing her trachea all over again. Squeezing the life out of her. The thoughts are like pus in a wound festering deep under his skin, hidden, now all seeping to the surface, stinking and putrid.

_No_. No, God no, he doesn’t want to hurt her; he never has. The thoughts are there, persistent, infesting his brain, but he doesn’t want them there, sure as hell doesn’t want to _act_ on them. He’d sooner put a gun to his head than lay an ill-meaning finger on her – but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe his own free will doesn’t factor into this equation.

He could do it in his sleep. He might not even _know_ he's doing it. He could wake with his hands wrapped around her throat.

Wake with her body going cold beside him.

“Ain’t even about what I want,” he says, mournfully. He wants to scream at her, threaten her, do _anything_ , anything at all, to spook her and get her to run, but he can’t make himself. He’s a coward – too much of a damn coward to do what he needs to do to protect her from himself. “I started… havin’ thoughts. Thoughts like that too. And I don’t wanna act on ‘em. Any of ‘em. But I don’t think that matters.” He gulps, turning away, unable to look her in the eyes. So ashamed he feels his cheeks burning. “If I can’t control myself… maybe I’ll do it anyway. I did it, before.”

Something flickers, in her eyes – the first hint of fear he’s seen all night in Laurel. Still, she doesn’t so much as tremble.

“What do you mean?”

“I was in jail. Never told you why,” he bites out. “I tried to kill my dad, when I was a kid. Just a stupid kid. Thirteen. Got locked up for years. And he didn’t… he didn’t even really do anything. But I had those thoughts. Thought they were gone – but now they’re back, around you. And I can’t control ‘em.” He can’t breathe. He can barely form words, can barely see her through his tears. “And I’m scared I’m gonna hurt you.”

“Would you ever hurt me?” she fires the question point-blank, right between his eyes. Impeccable aim.

He shakes his head. “I…”

“Answer me,” she demands, calmly, equanimous as ever, stepping closer to him. Wading through the hurricane that is his tortured mind like it’s nothing more than a drizzle. “Would you ever hurt me, Frank?”

“No,” he manages to say, shaking his head. He means it so much he aches.

“Then that’s that.”

He blinks, caught off guard.

“You think it’s that easy?” Laurel opens her mouth to say something, but he cuts her off, keeps going, manic. “I’m fucked up, Laurel. I’m not… right, in the head. Things I’ve done, what I could do… I don’t wanna do it now? Maybe I will one day anyway. To you. The kid. You should-” His words get clogged in his throat, too many try to escape too quickly.  “You should be afraid of me. I’m _bad_.”

Again, there’s all that certainty on Laurel features – certainty by now he’s convinced is entirely misplaced. Her chin is held high, and he sees her neck, and blinks, and suddenly there’s an intricate necklace of bruises left there by his hands, those same crimson specks of blood in her eyes. He feels sick.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

He doesn’t understand her. He never will. She’s so strong, so unafraid. She’s so comparatively tiny when she stands before him yet she’s staring him down like he’s a child; David and Goliath. He’d been the strong one, for so many months – or at least he’d acted the part. But all along she’s been stronger than him.

She’s so strong, and he loves her so much. And he’s _bad_.

Bad for her. Bad for everyone.

“You should be,” is all he can grind out.

Frank brushes past her, disappearing down the hall without another word. He can feel the rottenness and corruption and decay in his bones, right then, all the way down to his necrotic marrow. He’s rotten, inside and out, beyond redemption. He’ll spread the infection to her, if he’s not careful. Drag her down to hell too.

He shouldn’t be here. He should go; she isn’t safe with him here, but he’d promised he’d never leave her, again. So he can’t. He can’t be a killer _and_ an oath breaker.

Well – he could. Should. If he knew what was good for her.

He never has known what's good for her.

Instead of leaving, Frank just sits down onto the bed, letting his weight down like a million-pound bag of bricks, releasing his breath in one long stream. Everything is quiet, behind his eyes; no thoughts, no nothing intruding on him, urging him on, and when he glances up after a moment and finds Laurel standing in the doorway again, she’s so clear and bright it’s blinding. She seems to absorb the moonlight and redirect it. Or maybe she’s creating her own, somehow. She reminds him vaguely of some religious painting; pregnant Mother Mary, in her blue silken pajama pants.

He catches sight of the burn scar, extending up and down her arm. Burned, scarred, unholy Mother Mary, that’s what she is.

He wants to laugh. That must make him Joseph.

“You think you’re the only one who’s fucked up around here?” she asks, tone even and measured. Laurel stays where she is, eyeing him from a distance. “Wes and Sam. I helped them chop up Sam’s body. Burn it. And Connor and Wes. Asher and Sinclair. Wes shot Annalise. And Bonnie…” She drifts off. “Bonnie killed Rebecca.”

He freezes. “She told you?”

“I figured it out,” she says, simply. “I figured she was dead, the whole time. And if it’d been you, you would’ve told me already. I knew it wasn’t the others. That just left her.”

She shakes her head, throwing the thoughts away as she does and approaching where he sits, almost cowering before her. It feels appropriate, to cower.

“I still think about it, y’know,” she says, taking a seat beside him. “Driving to Michigan and finding Connor. Killing him. I think about it all the time. Making him… feel the kinda pain he made Wes feel. It would feel good. So good.” She meets his eyes, pointedly. “You’re a monster. And I know what you did, and I’m never… gonna be able to forget it. But you’re not the only one here.” She pauses, gives him a dry, cheerless grin. “Don’t act like you’re so special.”

“I don’t wanna hurt you,” he rasps, tearful again, the words almost infantile, like they’re the only ones in his vocabulary and he keeps repeating them, his thoughts circling hopelessly, going into a tailspin. “I’m scared… I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m dangerous. I know I am. I know what I can do.” He stares down at his hands. Blink, and they’re covered with lethal black leather; blink again, and the leather is gone. “I’m scared. Of myself.”

That’s what it is, he realizes. He doesn’t need her to be scared of him; _he’s_ scared of himself plenty already. He hates himself. He’s one seething, decayed mass of self-loathing, and maybe Annalise was right when she’d told him to end it. It would be justice, his death.

It would be the last good thing he can do for anyone.

But he can’t leave her. He looks sideways at Laurel, sees the blues of her eyes in the night, her concern for him, and he knows he can’t. He made a promise.

“Look at me,” she says, suddenly, and when he doesn’t comply she reaches out, placing her hands on his cheeks, forcing him to meet her eyes. “Look at me, Frank.”

Once he’s fixed his gaze steadily on her, Laurel gulps. He can feel her trembling, slightly; a tremor thrumming in her muscles and ligaments and tendons. Still, though, no fear.

“I know you would never hurt me,” Laurel says, enunciating each syllable as though she’s speaking to a child. “Say it. Say you’d never hurt me.”

He’s crying, now, and he’s not sure how hard, but it’s enough that his shoulders quake, his diaphragm seizing with sobs. He feels stupid. Broken. He wants to look away but he won’t dare. He isn’t sure, of himself. He can’t trust himself, or the darkness of his mind – but Laurel does. _She_ is sure of him, so sure, believing him in in that unquestioning, unfailing way Bonnie always has. He has no goddamn idea why.

They’re so broken now, both of them, that he can no longer identify which parts are shattered and which are whole. But Laurel sees something in him, in the wreckage, in his tar-black soul. Good that comes from somewhere. She sees him, and she knows she’s safe with him, and she’s so certain that little by little, some of that certainty flows into him too, and he starts to almost, maybe, believe it too.

“I’d never hurt you,” he echoes. “Either of you.”

Laurel draws back, and she nods. “I know. Now so do you.”

She believes him.

He hopes he can start believing himself like that one day, too.

 

~

 

The dreams don’t stop, straightaway. They come the next night, hooking their claws into him, just as terrifying, just as vivid. He strangles her to death all over again, her and Lila, and watches her bleed out, then watches _her_ strangle _him_. By now he should be able to predict what’s going to happen but somehow, every time, he feels that same, lurching horror when he sees her face for the first time, beneath his hands. That same boiling his blood that makes him lunge toward her, rabid.

He wakes up the same way he always does, flying forward, Laurel’s name on his lips, legs and arms flailing and twisting madly – but now, now that’s not all.

Now he wakes with Laurel’s soft hand on his arm. Her sweet, soothing voice in his ear.

“Hey,” she murmurs, voice carrying into his eardrums like a melody. Immediately his muscles release their tension, his breathes slowing, steadying; she’s always had this effect on him, been able to calm him. She moves closer to him, messy hair falling in her face, milky skin unbroken, unharmed. The sight of her doesn’t terrify him, now. She looks like a moonlit angel. “It’s okay, Frank.”

“You were-” The words burst out of his throat, jagged and rough. He runs a hand over his beard. “You were dead. I… killed you, I-”

He forgets that he doesn’t need to tell her; she already knows. Laurel nods.

“I know. Here.”

Before he can process what she’s doing, she’s grasping his hand, placing it on her neck, right where she’s so vulnerable, and he has a sudden, vivid flicker-thought that he could grasp her there, squeeze and squeeze until he’s wrung the last breath of air out of her – but it’s a flash, lasting hardly a second, and it fades quickly. At first Frank doesn’t know what she’s hoping to accomplish, guiding his fingers up higher and higher, until they’re just below her chin, where she presses them down.

That’s when he feels it.

Her pulse, fluttering strong and warm beneath her skin. Beating there daintily like the wings of a hummingbird.

Like a baby’s kick.

“Feel that?” she asks, sleepily. “I’m alive, see? You didn’t hurt me.” She pauses. “You’d never hurt me.”

“I don’t want to,” he mutters, pulling in a ragged breath. His whole body is trembling like he’s being battered by some invisible, internal wind, though that trembling is abating slowly. “I don’t want to, Laurel, I-”

“I know. I know you don’t.” She pauses, and reaches for his head, drawing it down to her chest and laying back against the pillow. “C’mere.”

She rakes her fingers through his hair as if, somehow, to quiet his tortured mind with her touch. Holding him to her breast. Shushing him like a child, almost motherly. He’s small, again. He feels so small, and unworthy of her, positively undeserving. She’s broken, too, though; it seems like they’re eternally playing roles, switching off, but for now she’s the strong one, collecting up his pieces as he falls apart – like he’s done for her so many times since losing Wes he’s lost track.

She’s half the woman she was before. He’s probably an even smaller fraction than that.

But all the math Frank has ever had had in school, what little of it his dumb brain could understand, taught him that two halves make a whole. That’s what they are, maybe. Broken halves learning to fit together again, become something that might be, one day, construed as whole.

They’ll be okay, he knows. He doesn’t know how he knows. Just that he does.

From this new position, he’s all but face-to-face with the prominent curve of her belly, and after they’re settled Laurel places a hand on top of it, laughing softly.

“He’s kicking,” she says on a yawn. “You woke him up.”

“Sorry,” he apologizes, and manages a watery chuckle, sniffing. He reaches his hand down, setting it over hers. “Sorry, buddy. Sometimes… even grown-ups get bad dreams, huh?”

“Mmm,” Laurel hums, and rests her chin on his forehead, closing her eyes. “He says it’s okay. Just not to do it again.”

Frank glances up at her, amused. “He havin’ you be his interpreter now?”

“Yes. And – oh, what’s that?” She pretends to be listening to something, some distant voice inside her head. “He’s saying… that we should all go back to asleep, and let his mom get some rest.”

“Roger that,” he remarks to her stomach, then glances up at her. “Won’t happen again, boss.”

Laurel laughs, and rolls over onto her side, facing away from him, as she’s taken to sleeping the larger her belly grows. He moves with her, up against her, curving his body around hers; a perfect fit, like always. And he falls asleep with one hand draped lazily over her stomach, protecting the child within – from whatever may come. Hell or high water or both. Or maybe, subconsciously, from himself. The things he knows he’s capable of.

Frank falls asleep not long after, comforted by the steady rise and fall of her chest, and it’s a long, blessedly dreamless sleep. Doesn’t mean the nightmares won’t come back, the thoughts with them. More than likely they will. He isn’t magically healed; a few words from Laurel aren’t some miraculous cure-all, and he’d known they wouldn’t be enough to right the damage to his demented brain, chase the demons out of it.

They’re thoughts. Just thoughts. They can’t hurt him, hurt her. Hurt the baby, or anyone. They’re not real and he won’t let them be.

And he isn’t healed, and he knows that. But he is heal _ing_. She is, too. Like skin and cells fusing together slowly to scab over a bloody wound. Sloughing off old layers. Rebuilding tissue and re-growing veins.

He isn’t healed. But he is healing, and her with him. That has to count for something, at least.


	8. VIII

Eventually, somehow, they get ready.

Relatively ready, Frank figures – at least relative to how ready they were before. Which was not at all.

He manages to assemble the cursed Ikea crib with at least some factor of stability, placing it in Laurel’s room by the window. He installs a car seat in her car, and one in his, too, and when she doesn’t protest the latter he feels like he’s won some unspoken little victory. He convinces her to go to Babies R’ Us, though she doesn’t seem much inclined.

Laurel doesn’t seem much inclined to do anything in the way of baby prep, really – or anything at all. She’s been taking a few classes at Middleton since summer began, to keep up with her coursework, but doesn’t seem invested in them. It all feels too normal. She still seems like she almost doesn’t believe she’s _allowed_ to do things that feel normal, anymore.

He may be doing it again. Playing house. Playing normal. Pretending things are less fucked than they are.

At this point what else is there to do.

“I been thinkin’,” he says one Saturday afternoon as he strides into her bedroom, a pile of old baby clothes from his parents clutched in his hands. “We should do one of those class things. Y’know. The Lamaze breathing or whatever.”

Laurel is seated in the upholstered chair over by her window, head turned, staring out of it. She doesn’t answer him, or even acknowledge his presence – but not in a way that feels like she’s snubbing him, giving him the cold shoulder; in a way that feels like she’s genuinely too deep in thought to hear anything that isn’t on the inside of her own head. She’s resting her chin on her hand, sunlight slanting over her in rays, making the outline of her silhouette shimmer gold. It dances in the copper tones in her hair, which have almost all grown out by now; she hadn’t bothered to re-dye it after the fire, after those long months of surgery and healing.

It shines on her burn; the scarred, puckered pink skin. Healed, in a literal sense. But never really healed.

Her eyes are distant. He can tell she’s lost in her mind; gone away somewhere, like she still does sometimes. Swarmed by memories. Haunted by ghosts. She’s rubbing her lips together, creases forming in her brow. She looks beautiful and she doesn’t have to try; it’s her natural, resting state. He wants to tell her, break through her reverie and let her know that, but he stops himself.

That’s not what he is to her, anymore. Not someone who gets to call her beautiful. Not her boyfriend. He still doesn’t know _what_ he is, but he isn’t her boyfriend.

She’s beautiful regardless. Glowing. She hadn’t been, the first several months; her grief and anger had sapped all that glow out of her, but now it’s broken through anyway, and it’s not a cliché, not an exaggeration. It’s in the hollows of her cheeks, her sunkissed skin, catching the light greys and blues of her irises, making them sparkle. She’s gleaming, her every pore spilling sunlight.

And he loves her, right then, so much. As if he’s ever stopped.

Laurel slips out of her trance after a moment, and she catches sight of him out of her peripheral, turning her head. “Oh, hey. Sorry, what?”

“Lamaze,” he repeats, patient, still spellbound. “We should take a class.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, distracted. “Sounds fun.”

He sets the pile of clothing down on top of her dresser and makes his way over to her, lifting her legs out of the way briefly, taking a seat further down on the chair, then tugging them into his lap. He grasps her ankle, massaging one of her feet almost out of habit, though she hasn’t given him any verbal indication she’s in pain. Her belly only continues to balloon out by the day, smashing her back and just about every one of her internal organs into submission, swelling her ankles to an almost ludicrous degree. He knows how much it must suck. And he doesn’t mind doing what little he can to make her comfortable.

“Oh, God,” she groans softly. “That feels amazing.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm hmm,” she hums, then sighs, head lolling back against the chair. “You’re getting good. Could open a… maternity foot massage parlor on the side.”

He grimaces. “Don’t think I’d wanna touch feet all day.”

“You touch mine all day.”

“Yeah,” he concedes, “but they’re yours.”

She scoffs. “You saying my feet are a grade above normal pregnant lady feet?”

“You know it.”

He chuckles, and she joins him for a moment, but hers die down quickly, fading, until she’s somber again. Frank notices, and frowns.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, though it’s forced, unconvincing. “Yeah, it’s nothing, I just…”

“What?”

Laurel sucks in a breath, glancing down at her belly, troubled. “He hasn’t kicked. All day. I’m worried.”

Frank shrugs. “So he’s takin’ a little siesta. No biggie.”

“No, but…” She shakes her head. “He always kicks all the time, in the afternoon. And he hasn’t kicked at all. Not since last night.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” he soothes, scooting closer to her. “Maybe kid just wants a day off. Can’t expect him to be a mini soccer star 24/7.”

He tries to joke, lighten the mood, but the attempt falls flat and Laurel doesn’t smile. She’s slipping back into that sullen silence, slipping out of this world of the living and into her own. She’s worried, he can tell; more than she’s letting on, and it’s a dark, sinister kind of worry, buried in her eyes.

“It’s not just that,” she mumbles, peering out the window, eyes drifting out of focus. “I don’t… I don’t think I can do it. Be a mom. Love him like he needs. Love him…” Her voice grows strained, thick with sorrow. “Love him enough for both of us. For Wes.”

It breaks his heart, to listen to her talk like that. Like she’s reaching in with her bare hands and clawing the thing to bloody chunks. She looks so terrified; terrified she simply doesn’t have enough love in her to give, enough to fill the void Wes’s death has left in this child’s life already.

Terrified she’s been hurting so long she’s forgotten how to love at all.

He wants to tell her he’ll be there, that he can help her, give this child a father. Love him like he deserves – but he knows she won’t take to that idea well. More than likely she’ll think he’s trying to usurp Wes’s place as his father, erase him clean off the slate like he’d never been there at all, and that’s not what he wants, not at all. But he doesn’t want to overstep his bounds either, so he stays quiet, keeps the sentiment to himself.

Laurel lowers her eyes, sniffing. “I’m just gonna mess him up.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” he undertones gently, releasing her foot. “You’re not gonna mess him up, Laurel, no way you could.”

“With everything I’ve done? Everything _we’ve_ done? I’m fucked up. I’ll fuck him up, like my dad fucked me up.” She bites out a bitter laugh, the sound chewing at him like acid. “The apple never falls far from the tree, huh?”

“That’s not true. That’s _bull_ ,” he says, so forcefully she seems surprised. “You’re not like him. You know you’d never do anything to hurt him. You love him, so much. And he’s gonna love you.” He swallows. “And if you want me there… I’ll love him too.”

“Frank…”

“So he’s gonna _have_ love,” Frank tells her, suddenly so sure; as sure as she’d been about believing she was safe with him, that kind of unwavering, innate conviction that grows in your bones. “He’s gonna have so much love he won’t know what to do with it.”

She sniffs, giving a watery laugh. “I hope you’re right.”

“I am,” he urges. “I know things are messed up now. We’ll make ‘em better. We can get better.” He pauses, meeting her eyes. “One day… one day we’re gonna be all right.”

_We_. He hadn’t been using that word, consciously; it’d slipped into his vocabulary almost of its own volition, like it belongs – and it feels like it does. All these long months, being here with her, so close and so far, he’s begun to think of them as a unit without realizing it; him and her and the baby.

He knows, of course, that he doesn’t fit into that equation. He’s the odd one out, the which-one-of-these-things-does-not-belong, and this baby isn’t his, and he never will be, not by blood at least. But Laurel isn’t pushing him away, now; he’s made his way back into her life, by some miracle, and she’s let him. She _wants_ him here. She chose him and he’s so incredibly undeserving that sometimes it makes his head spin just to contemplate it. All the bad he’s done, people he’s hurt, lives he’s taken… He’s bad. Bad, inside and out, and rotten and irredeemable. There’s no saving him.

And maybe _normal_ and _okay_ are pipe dreams for him, for people like them, but he’ll get them there, somehow. Even if it damn near kills him. He will.

“I know,” she murmurs, forces a smile laced with anxiety. And she says nothing more.

 

~

 

Five in the evening. He still hasn’t moved.

He’d been trying to pretend everything is peachy, but Frank can tell Laurel is scared out of her wits, pacing around, constantly checking the time, placing a hand on her belly like somehow she can stir the child with her touch – and if he’s being honest, he is too. Scared shitless.

They both know what she’s thinking. Neither of them want to say it aloud.

“He’s still not moving,” she breathes. She’s pacing in frantic circles around the kitchen when he comes upon her, looking dangerously close to a panic attack. “Something must be wrong, he… He should be moving. He moves all the time-”

“Hey, hey, it’s fine,” he soothes, though he can’t figure the pit forming in his gut too; those gnawing barbs of his subconscious telling him that maybe something _is_ wrong, gravely wrong. “I’m sure it’s fine, okay? Probably doesn’t mean anything.”

She shakes her head, lower lip trembling. She looks so terrified he almost reaches out to her, draws her into his arms and holds her, but refrains at the last second, keeping his distance.

“Something’s wrong,” she insists, pulling in a shaky breath. Her eyes are glassy, two huge blue puddles. “I can… I can feel it, something’s wrong with him.”

Frank steps closer, sinking down onto his knees before her. “Here. Lemme talk to him. He always moves when I talk.”

He ignores the sour feeling brewing in his gut, positioning his face in front of her bulging stomach; so big on her petite frame by now it’s almost comical – and there’s nothing comical at all about this now, about her fears, but he tries to lighten the mood, grinning at her belly, like somehow the baby has a window to the outside to see.

“Hey. Falcon One to Falcon Two,” he murmurs, somehow wrangles a weak smile onto his lips and keeps it there. “Come in Falcon Two. You copy?”

Nothing.

No answering kick, no stirring; not even a gentle nudge, some definitive confirmation of life. His stomach sinks further, his insides all scrambled and hopelessly tied into knots. His throat feels packed tight with sand and twice as dry, and he doesn’t have to look up at Laurel to know she looks infinitely more terrified now.

“Hey, bud. C’mon, give us something here,” Frank continues, his smile faltering. “Ground control to Major Tom. Can you hear me Major Tom?”

Again, nothing.

Before he can open his mouth and try for a third time, Laurel pulls away suddenly, grabs her keys off the counter, and darts toward the door, announcing, “I’m going to the hospital.”

He gets to his feet, has to practically run to catch up with her; she can walk surprisingly quickly even with her waddling gait, it turns out. “Laurel, it’s… fine, he’s probably-”

“I’m _going_ ,” she repeats, rounding on him suddenly, so suddenly he flinches, and when he does he can see the tears threatening to brim over her eyelids like water cresting a dam, threatening to overflow. “And if you don’t wanna come I can drive myself.”

“’Course I wanna come,” he soothes her, and holds out his hand, gesturing for the keys. “Hey. Let me drive. I wanna come.”

After a moment she hands them over, and they pile into her car. Frank violates pretty much every posted speed limit, heedless of the signs, his gaze like tunnel vision on the road, able to think only of his destination. Laurel looks pale, in the passenger side; paler than he’s ever seen her, and so still he can’t tell if she’s breathing. He reaches over, halfway there, and takes her hand, sewing his fingers in what hers, offering her whatever meager comfort that might be.

She doesn’t look at him. She seems too scared to move, and he knows what she’s thinking because the longer this goes on, the more he’s thinking it too, the thought swarming his head like the drones of June bugs.

Neither of them are going to say it. Not until they have to.

Eventually they get there, and he helps her out of the car, into the packed emergency room of Middleton Hospital, full of broken bones and cuts and burns and a plethora of sicknesses. They end up directing them to the medical imaging ward, to keep her away from the small army of sneezing, infectious children and elderly, and plop them down in a near-empty waiting room with cream-colored walls and rock-hard chairs, which make Frank’s back ache within the first twenty minutes – and he can’t even begin to imagine how uncomfortable it must be for her, but Laurel makes no complaints. She’s gone totally silent, body angled away from him so slightly it’s almost imperceptible, but enough to make it clear that she doesn’t want to talk. She’s eyeing her stomach like some cold, foreign growth. Like a tumor.

He doesn’t know how long they wait there for. Could be minutes, or hours. There’s no clock on the wall and he’s not inclined to check his phone. He watches the world around them rush by like a man watching his life from the outside; a movie-goer at his own fucked up biopic. Anxiety takes root from the seed-pit in his stomach and grows as the minutes tick by, spreading like vines through his limbs and veins and muscles until it’s everywhere, planting seeds in his mind. Taking control. His mind gives itself over to that darkness, before he can help it. The baby’s not moving and there is probably, realistically, only one reason why that might be.

He can’t think it. Thinking it will make it real, and they can’t lose this baby. They’ve lost so much already.

Forget him. _She’s_ lost so much already.

Frank doesn’t have to ask to know she’s think of Wes, wishing he were here in his place, and that doesn’t offend him, make him angry. He can’t comfort her the way he should; the way Wes would, with that bond only two people who have created a child can understand. But he’s gotten more attached than he should’ve, to this child that isn’t his, and he’s consumed with fear, eaten alive by it. It strips his bones like a wake of vultures until he has nothing left. Until he's a skeleton.

Laurel starts picking at her fingers, after an hour or two or maybe three has passed, with more fervor than she usually does. She’s taken to biting her nails in recent months though she never used to, tearing them to stubs and then tearing down the hangnails that form, until her once-delicate, tapered fingers are bloody and scabbed. He notices, and reaches over, placing his large hand on top of hers to stop her.

“Hey,” he chides, gently. “Don’t.”

She shrugs him off, moves her hand away without a word; just an annoyed glare. She doesn’t speak, for a while, and continues picking at a scraggly hangnail on her thumb until tiny beads of blood bloom there.

“I think it’s dead,” Laurel says, finally, with a sniff. “That’s why it’s not moving.”

_It_. Not _him_ , anymore. _Him_ feels too personal, now. _It_ feels like detachment, like she’s letting go of the idea of this baby preemptively, letting go so when it’s inevitably ripped away from her it won’t hurt as much.

The knot in his throat swells. “Don’t say that.”

“I know something’s gonna happen,” she continues, eyes fixed straight ahead. Her words don’t seem aimed at him, again, like she isn’t talking to him at all. He’s just a bystander. Someone who happens to hear. “I feel like a… giant ticking time bomb.”

“Laurel…”

“Maybe it’s better this way.” She gulps, her lower lip just starting to tremble the slightest bit. “If I can’t do this. And I can’t. I was so… so stupid to think I could. And if he’s dead…” More tears, now. A flood. “If he’s dead at least he’ll be with Wes. He won’t be alone.”

“You don’t-” His voice catches in his throat. “We don’t know that.”

“I do,” she tells him, finally turning her head and meeting his eyes. “I can feel it. He feels… colder.” She shakes her head. “I think he’s gone.”

He bites down on the insides of his cheeks, does everything in his power to plug up the tears he can feel fast approaching in his own eyes – to see her in such pain. To imagine how this loss must feel for her. She knows it, knows it in her bones, and she must be right. It’s that innate, maternal instinct; she has it and she knows. And he doesn’t have any goddamn right to be sad, probably, but the idea of losing the baby – that tiny creature he’d felt kick so many times, had carried on long, secret late night conversations with after Laurel had fallen asleep beside him – makes him sick in a way he’s never felt sick before.

They don’t get good things. Or happy endings. He should’ve known that by now.

How had he been so _stupid_.

They lapse into silence, after that, mourning silently, side by side. Laurel still isn’t giving him any indication she wants to be touched, or comforted, so he doesn’t. He sits there, feeling stupid and useless; a poor stand-in for the person she really wants by her side. A man he can never be.

Eventually a nurse comes and leads them down a hallway, into one of the ultrasound rooms, where a nameless, faceless, shapeless technician sits on one of those little rolling stools, and introduces themselves. They don’t matter, their name, their face; they exist only to be the bearer of inevitable bad news. Frank can barely see them at all. Their voice fades in and out, as somehow Laurel manages to explain what’s going on: how he hasn’t been kicking, moving at all. How she thinks something must be wrong. Their voices sound muffled, like they’re a million miles away. The world is grey.

Then the tech flips on the machine, and guides the transducer across her belly, and it becomes flooded with blinding technicolor all over again.

He’d been terrified, so sure there would be no sound, no nothing. Just empty hollowness and grey. But there’s that drumbeat again, stubborn and steady as anything, just as strong as it’s always been and even stronger now. A head and body and even a diminutive little nose that Frank can’t even begin to imagine the size of compared to his own. The drumbeat playing its own song; one that’s more beautiful than any Frank has ever heard, a rebellion in itself. Rebelling and defying every force, every single thing that should’ve killed it long ago. He remembers the first time he’d heard it, all those long months ago when they’d both been so broken. That declaration of life, of intent to fight. Her son is a fighter, just like Laurel.

This child is probably already far stronger than he is. Stronger than he’ll ever be. Like she is.

“He’s looks A-okay,” the tech announces cheerfully, and suddenly he sees her take human form; a woman, late thirties at most, blonde and beaming, voice squeaky and high-pitched, but soothing. “He was probably just taking a break from bouncing around in there. Sometimes babies do.”

Frank loses himself in it, in the picture on the screen, the sound hammering in his eardrums and – he swears, though maybe he’s imagining it – briefly syncing up with his own heartbeat. He doesn’t think he’s loved anything so completely yet so irrationally, because by all logic and reason he _has_ no reason to be so attached, nothing binding him to this baby. Nothing besides choice.

He thinks choice might be stronger even than blood. But it’s not his choice to make.

Frank loses himself in it all, and the only thing that ropes him back down to each is the sudden slipping of a hand into his. It sends an electric pulse through him, when he looks to his side and sees Laurel staring at him, clasping his hand in hers, her face soaked with happy tears, nose running. He can’t remember the last time he saw her so happy – really happy. A smile has spread itself across her features, big and bright and beautiful, full of relief. She looks so bright, again, glowing all over. It’s been so long, since they had this. Since they had a miracle.

“He’s okay,” she chokes out, sniffling. He squeezes her hand, heart overflowing, expanding too big for his chest. When she squeezes back, he thinks it’s liable to crack his ribs and burst and kill him. “He’s okay.”

She’s telling him. But she’s also telling someone else, her eyes raised to the ceiling. Raised to the sky, the stars and the clouds and all their unseen inhabitants.

She’s telling Wes, too.

After a little while the tech finishes up, switching off the machine and wipes the gel off her stomach, and leaving them alone for a moment in the little room. The windows behind them are black with the night, the distant sound of a summer rain pelting them. And still all Frank is really cognizant of is the replay of that heartbeat echoing in his skull, and the cold clamminess of Laurel’s hand as she sits up, linking them together, not willing to let go just yet. Looking at him with affection and warmth in her eyes – so different from the hollow hatred she’d given him before, all that ice melted and thawed.

They’ve come so far. They still have so far to go. But none of that feels like it matters, in this moment.

“I love you,” he tells her, the words slipping past his lips though he doesn’t mean to say them. They burst right out of their own accord, unable to be contained, so simple yet so strong, and he raises her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to the back of it, the tears in his eyes a faint mist, now. “Both of you.”

Laurel nods, gives a watery smile back. “I know.”

She doesn’t say it back. Return the sentiment. She isn’t ready for that, won’t be for a very long time, and it doesn’t bother him. She’ll say it when she’s ready – if she ever is.

They’ve come so far, after all. Even if they still have so far to go.


	9. IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gotta give credit where credit is due to the incomparable Em (Catwithamauser) and her fic Cao Dai Blowout, which inspired little chunks of this ;) She rocks. Go read that fic it’s ze BOMB. This shit is also wrapping up!! So leave me a comment/kudos to let me know what you think because I crave validation.
> 
> ALSO in case any of you are curious, I've made a little soundtrack for this fic [here](http://8tracks.com/aghamora1/nox-aurumque). If you're like me and like mood music while reading things, feel free to check it out! I've done it so that each song corresponds to a chapter, but it also fits the fic overall :)

 

They’re at Annalise’s new office when it happens.

He’s back working for her – under probationary status, of course. Extreme probationary status, because he’s fairly certain she still hates him, but he’s useful enough to her that she seems inclined to overlook that fact. Annalise had reopened her practice post-trial, struggling to rebuild from the ground up, after it, quite literally, burned _to_ the ground – or at least as much as she can with her reputation preceding her, a roadblock at every turn. And he and Bonnie are along for the ride, of course.

He and Bonnie will be probably along for the ride until one or both of them croak, he figures. That’s how ride-or-die goes.

It’s late at night when Laurel comes bursting through the front door, footsteps clopping heavily on the hardwood, walking with her odd, unsteady half-waddling gait she’s adopted as she’s grown larger, adapting to her shifting center of gravity. Frank hears the sound from the next room and steps out, and finds Laurel peering around the hallway with her purse in hand, newly-built walls with that newly-built building smell, all varnish and paint and plastic.

“Hey,” he greets, brow furrowed. “What’re you doin’ here?”

“I had to come see it,” she remarks, voice tight. She’s angry; that much isn’t hard to deduce. It’s catching in her eyes, spreading by the second like wildfire. “The new office. It’s… nice.”

He blinks. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Is that Annalise’s office?” she asks, glancing straight ahead at a set of double doors, the layout much the same as the old house had been. When he nods, she presses, “She here?”

“Yeah,” he affirms, then furrows his brow, moving in closer. “What’s this about?”

“I just want to talk to her,” is all he gets; simple, flippant. She seems annoyed by his presence, eager to push past him and be done. “Is that so weird?”

“No… No, it’s not, I just-”

“Laurel? What’re you doing here?”

Frank turns, and finds Annalise standing behind them in her office doorway, appraising them through narrowed eyes. The moment she comes into view he sees Laurel stiffen, raising her chin, the muscles in her jaw rippling when she clenches it. He doesn’t have to ask to know Laurel harbors resentment toward Annalise. For doing this, reopening the office. Moving on.

Trying to forget.

“I just… came to see this place,” she says, everything about her screaming passive aggression. She steps past him, motioning to the walls around her. “The new office.”

Annalise looks bewildered, a little wary, and doesn’t answer. After a moment Laurel drops the act, coming to a stop before her.

“How could you do this?”

Annalise firms up her stance, folding her arms. “Do what?”

“All this,” she says, with an odd tearful half-laugh, half-scoff. She glances around, and gestures again in the vague direction of the walls, all deep red chestnut, a few shades darker than blood. “Rebuild. Open up again. After everything.” She gulps, raising her chin. “After Wes.”

Annalise sighs. “Laurel…”

“It’s like nothing ever happened,” Laurel continues, taking another more daring step towards her. “You’ve just… forgotten he ever existed. And now, next year? You’ll get new students, right? A new Wes? Maybe that one will make it out alive, at least.”

“No one could ever replace Wes for me, Laurel, you know that,” Annalise says, raising her voice, a biting edge to it. “What would you have me do, anyway? Stay stuck in the past forever? Grieving him? Never moving on?”

Laurel shakes her head, biting out a bitter laugh.

“You never really cared about him. You can just… y-you can just move on, like you never knew him. Like he was never important to you. I can’t do that.” She glances down at her monster of a stomach, briefly, and laughs again. “You think I can forget, seeing this every day?”

“I’m not forgetting him. I could never forget him. Just because my grief doesn’t look the way you think it should-”

“Grief? What _grief_?” Laurel chortles, disbelieving. Her eyes are shimmering with unshed tears now, brimming over. “You were probably glad. He was gonna take you down. He would’ve. And you would’ve deserved it.” She sniffs. “For all I know you were in on it. You helped kill him.”

“Is that what you think of me? That I’d do that to him?”

“Why not?” Laurel bites out, past the point of logic or reason or sense, mind spiraling out of control, and Frank can sense the situation escalating rapidly but he hangs back, cautious, not knowing how to intervene. “After Sam. Sinclair. Rebecca. Framing Nate. What should I think?”

Laurel seems almost drunk, he notices – though he knows she’s not. Rage drunk, maybe. Drunk on sorrow and loneliness and grief. She thinks of Wes more than she mentions, Frank knows. Far more. Every second of every day, feeling her son kick, knowing his father should be here to feel, to share in the moment, but isn’t. Isn’t and will never be.

This had been simmering beneath the surface all along, all this anger toward Annalise. He should’ve known it’d come to a head sooner or later.

“He was like my son. The closest thing I ever had to a son. How dare you stand there and accuse me of-”

“How _dare_ I?” she shoots back, fearless. So strong and fearless in the face of Annalise Keating that he almost can’t say how proud he is of her – but he’s worried, too. Knows she shouldn’t be working herself up like this. Needs to stay calm. “I-is that how you’d treat your son? You _ruined_ him. Ruined his life. All you ever did was manipulate him. You made him shoot you – then made him feel awful for weeks after he did. Y-you lied to him about his mother. Made him think he was going crazy. That he’d killed her. And Rebecca…” She sniffs, steadying her breathing long enough to choke out her name. “You let him believe she was alive when you knew she wasn’t. You let him think he was losing it over her, too. So yeah, maybe you didn’t kill him. Not yourself. But it was… _ah_ … it was your fault, it-”

It almost doesn’t register, in Frank’s mind, but he blinks and suddenly Laurel is doubled over in pain, crumpling away from Annalise like a wilting flower, scrambling to get purchase with her hands on any surface and brace herself against the wall. She whimpers, and the whimper morphs into a groan as one of her hands flies to her stomach, clutching it, legs threatening to give out underneath her.

He’s at her side in seconds, holding her up, catching her before she falls. “Hey. Hey, I got you. What’s goin’ on?”

“Something’s wrong,” she manages, gritting her teeth through what must be a wave of pain, burning in her belly. She stumbles back against the wall, using it to keep herself upright, brows cinched together and eyes squeezed shut. “It hurts.”

Frank gulps, mind whirring into overdrive, and when he glances down, at her legs and the space between them, every ounce of blood in his body crystallizes into ice, freezing his heart, stilling the bloody, pulsing mass in seconds. She’s wearing tights underneath her skirt, and it’s hard to see on the black material but he can very clearly see a wet spot there, expanding down her legs, dampening them. He’d have to be an idiot not to know what it is. What it means.

“Your water broke,” he observes, dumbly, mouth hanging agape.

Laurel frowns, and after the pain passes she follows his eyes, taking in the sight with equal horror.

“No,” she breathes, frantic. She shakes her head, closing her eyes, as if somehow doing so will make this less than real, like she can count backwards from ten and wake up. “No, no, n-no, it’s way too soon.”

Frank tries to say something, but his mind is locked up with panic, short-circuiting and malfunctioning like a fuse box, and he can’t manage it. Instead he watches, frozen along with Annalise, as Laurel dips a hand into her tights and holds it up before her – and when she does, it comes away wet, coated with fluid that looks almost tinged with pink.

Pink. Then red, toward the center of her palm.

Streaks of watery blood.

“Th-there’s blood in it,” she stammers, and he’s still too horrified to do anything. He’s panicking. He’s goddamn near useless to her, like this, and he can’t snap out of it. She looks to him for guidance, reassurance; for an answer he doesn’t have. “Why is there blood in it?”

“I don’t know,” he finally makes himself blurt out, feigning optimism, flippancy. Like this isn’t a big deal at all. Like her water hasn’t broken a month and a half early, the baby coming long before his time. “I, uh… I don’t know. Let’s get you to the hospital, okay?”

“I’ll drive you,” Annalise steps in, but Laurel glowers at her, territorial as an animal, teeth barred.

“Stay the _hell_ away from me,” she snaps, eyes wild, as Frank loops an arm around her, letting her support herself on him. “Stay the hell away from both of us.”

 _Us_. She doesn’t mean him. She means the baby. Wes’s son. The baby he’s sure Laurel believes Annalise can only ever hurt and fuck up and destroy, like she’d done to Wes, done to all of them. He knows Laurel. Knows she believes getting mixed up with Annalise Keating was the sole catalyst for her life going to shit – and she’s probably right.

She’ll keep her son away from her. Keep him safe. He hasn’t been born yet and she’s already so, so fiercely protective of him. So strong.

He helps her into the car, driving that familiar route to Middleton Hospital for the millionth time. And he knows she’ll need to be.

 

~

 

Again, it all becomes a hellish, sterile blur.

Moments choppy, skipping around, like a broken video cassette. Like one of those flip books with little stick-figure animations illustrated by children, jumping all around chaotically. Nothing coherent or making sense. It might be his mind’s coping mechanism, or simply some fault in his perception of the world when things go horribly wrong.

They manage to get her checked in and settled into a room, and hooked up to a million and one IV’s, pumping God knows what into her. Monitoring her, at first. The contractions aren’t stopping. They run tests. An ultrasound. Her labor isn’t stopping. They can’t make it stop.

 _Fetal distress_ , he hears, the only words he can catch from their doctor, the world all heavy and slowed and distorted around him, as if he’s underwater trying to listen to something on the surface. _Falling heart rate._ They consider giving her drugs, to prevent labor, at least for a day or two. Buy them time to give her steroids, help the baby’s lungs develop. His lungs aren’t developed – not enough, they say. Not yet. It’s too soon.

It’s too soon. None of this is right. It wasn’t supposed to _be_ like this.

The blood in her water isn’t particularly bad, according to them. Doesn’t really mean anything at all – but that doesn’t reassure Laurel, pale and terrified, still as a corpse on the hospital bed, all gone away on the inside again. Booted down into that semi-alive, unfeeling state and staring off into space.

It does mean something, to her. It’s a bad omen.

Hours pass. She labors into the night, most of the time batting him away when he tries to touch her, not wanting _anyone_ to touch her. She’s burning up, one minute. Freezing cold the next. She asks, a few times, for him to leave her alone – and it kills him to leave her like this, in agony and terrified. Her body betraying her and trying to cast out the child far too soon, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, something that was never meant to be there in the first place. It kills him to leave her, twists a knife in his sternum and carves him hollow. But he does.

She needs to be alone. Alone, with her ghost. With the only person she really wants here; the only one who can never be here, again. He isn’t the one she truly wants, with him. And he can’t make that better. Can’t make it hurt less. He can’t be that ghost. He can’t take his place.

But he can _be_ there. It’s all he can do.

Hours pass. They’d been trying for a vaginal delivery; Laurel hadn’t wanted a C-section, hadn’t wanted to be sliced open like an animal, and she’d made that very clear. But the baby’s heart rate is falling, dropping, dipping erratically, little staccato beats on the fetal heart monitor; that song Frank is so familiar with now changing, slowing, the tempo markings all hopelessly confused. He isn’t coming. It feels like it’s been years when the doctors finally decide on an emergency C-section, deciding they’ve waited long enough and shouldn’t risk waiting longer.

Still a blur. Everything will be okay, the doctor assures them. Babies born eight weeks too soon have a good survival rate. Really good. Laurel doesn’t seem convinced.

Laurel barely seems to hear the man at all.

“Hey,” he assures her, after the doctors and nurses bow out for a moment to ready themselves for the procedure, leaving them a moment alone together. “It’s all good. Just a quick… in and out, and he’s here. He-”

His voice breaks off, optimism faltering, like the legs he’s been standing on this whole time are giving out beneath him. He’s so tired – and Laurel isn’t buying it, anyway. She’s pale and sweaty on the tissue-thin sheets, face beet red, bits of hair plastered to her forehead. She looks so tiny, suddenly. Dwarfed by the bed and swallowed up by the machines around her, like she’d looked that day he’d first visited her in the hospital after the fire.

Silent. Not herself. She might as well be a ghost, too.

“I knew it,” she murmurs, finally, voice so soft he has to strain to hear. It has a hollow ring in it, hollow and hoarse, thick with tears, but she’s done crying. She was done crying hours ago. “I knew something was wrong.”

“It’s gonna be okay. You heard the doc,” he says. He’s reaching, now, grasping at straws. “He’s fine.”

“You believe them?” she deadpans. “They’re wrong. Something’s gonna happen. To me. Or to him. I know it.” She pauses. Again, she lowers her eyes to her hands, picking the cuticles bloody, ripping at them savagely. “You don’t get it. But I _know_.”

She knows. With her mother’s instinct, that intrinsic sixth-sense in her bones, she looks so certain. She’s never looked more certain of anything than the fact that she’s going to lose this baby. Or it’ll be her. Or both of them. More death. More death and blood and loss.

It’s all they get. Death and blood and loss is the foundation their lives are built on.

Death and blood and loss is all they know, and who are they to think they deserve anything more.

 

~

 

Operating room, now.

Before Frank had had a somewhat solid grasp on time; now he has no hold on it whatsoever. He lost track of the hours hours ago. The minutes slip from his grasp before he can pin them down, make an attempt to count them. The clock on the wall looks like hieroglyphics, blurred and unrecognizable. It’s disorienting, almost to a nauseating degree, flowing too fast then too slow, never at a steady, discernible pace.

Time isn’t real, anyway. He doesn’t know why he bothers. Why he prays empty, trite prayers, as they lay Laurel down and pump all sorts of anesthesia into her body, numbing her lower half so she can’t feel a thing. Paralyzing her so they can slice her open and let her bleed. He shouldn’t bother praying, to a God that’s never been there; a God that can’t possibly exist if people like _him_ are allowed to exist.

They’re so tiny. So inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. Laurel and her son. There is no God, but if there was, he wouldn’t care about them. They mean nothing.

They mean everything.

He holds her hand as they begin, overwhelmed by a cacophony of beeps and buzzes and low, hushed voices; so many beeps he can’t discern the origins of them. After a while he becomes convinced, somehow, in his exhaustion, that they’re coming from him, like he’s hooked up to invisible wires, as many as Laurel is. A disturbing, almost deafening awareness of his own heartbeat takes over. Rubatosis. It’s all he can hear, those beeps, the sound of blood pumping in his eardrums.

He remembers that song, that beat the baby had marched to during their ultrasounds, his own drumbeat. It’s different, now. Slower. Choppier. It’s not strong anymore.

Laurel is silent, for the most part. Eerily silent. She’s been numbed, and can only barely move her arms, her eyelids slipping shut now and then as if in slumber. She isn’t in pain, or at least doesn’t seem to be, and he’s infinitely grateful for that. She should never have to feel pain; she’s felt so much already. More than her fair share.

He’s not sure how much more she can take.

“Can you see him?” she slurs, words garbled, tongue loosened by the drugs; a tube up her nose and a plastic cap over her hair. There seems to be a fog hanging over her; a cloudy haze in the blues of her eyes.

There’s a sheet suspended in front of them, with the express purpose of blocking their view so they _can’t_ see, and Frank doesn’t want to. The thought of seeing her slit open turns his stomach, but he’s no longer able to deny her anything, and so he doesn’t. He stands, the blue scrubs on his body scratching like paper when he moves, and peeks over the sheet, at the doctor’s careful work. All he can see is blood, at first, his world dissolving into a macabre pallet of blue and red – so much red it makes his stomach coil in on itself.

He can’t see much; they’d cut into her just above her pelvis and the incision isn’t facing him, but he can see enough. Mostly blood. Blood, and the doctors rummaging around in her insides, rushing to liberate the child. He’s not a doctor, not even close, but he thinks there’s more than there should be spilling out of her, onto the blue sheets, coating the doctor’s gloves, their sleeves. He’d had no idea such a petite body like hers could even _have_ so much blood. She’s just a bag of it; a bag of flesh and bone and blood.

Suddenly all he can do is remember his dream, those trails of blood flowing too easily from her wrists, her stomach, that crimson-soaked bed. Maybe this is what it’d been foreshadowing. Him losing her in a bed of blood.

Frank shakes his head, shakes the thought away. He can’t go there. If he goes to that place in his mind he’s not going to be able to come back, and then he won’t be any use to her at all.

“Not yet,” he strains, wrestling a strained smile onto his lips. “He’s just… takin’ awhile to show up. He’s a soccer superstar, ‘member? Probably thinks he’s a big shot and all that. Makin’ us wait.”

He tries to lighten the mood, cut the tension in the air, but the joke falls flat, and Laurel doesn’t smile. She’s paler, now, white as bone but somehow almost lighter than that, skin nearly translucent. Her skin looks pallid underneath the fluorescent lights above them, every bead of sweat on her forehead clear to see, gleaming.

“Everything’s okay,” he soothes her, though the urgency in the doctor’s voice indicates the opposite, as she bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. Fades. He holds her hand tighter, like somehow it can ground her, moor her. “You said you know somethin’s wrong? _I_ know it’s not. Okay? I _know_.”

It’s a pitying look, the one Laurel gives him. Like he’s a hopeless, stupid fool.

“You’re wrong,” she whispers. “It was… it was always gonna happen like this.” She pauses, eyes locked on the ceiling tiles. They look almost unseeing, now, like her brain has disconnected from them, gone somewhere else. “If both of us can’t make it… I want it to be him. I want him to live.”

“No,” he chokes out, jaw clenched. “Ain’t no reason both of you aren’t gonna make it out all right. He’s fine. _You’re_ fine.”

Laurel ignores him. Or maybe she genuinely doesn’t hear, lost in her mind as she is, that terrible, beautiful place he’ll never be able to understand. He’s always been able to understand her, feel what she’s feeling. But it feels like some internal plug has been yanked from some internal socket, and she’s no longer on the same frequency he is, and he doesn’t recognize her. He doesn’t think she’s speaking any language he’s ever heard.

“It’s okay now,” she says, voice lilting and light, almost a coo, an air of blissful resignation on her face. “I’m not scared.” She looks like she’s drifting off, speaking as if in a dream. She looks so happy, confronting what she believes is her own death. She looks at peace. “I’ll be with him. That’s… that’s all I want.”

She’s saying goodbye. The realization makes him go rigid, every muscle in his body tensing. She’s saying goodbye to him. Giving up. She believes she’s dying. Maybe she’s right.

Maybe he _is_ wrong.

“Don’t say that. Why’re you-” His throat twists shut. “Why’re you talkin’ like that, huh? Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

“You’re wrong,” is all she says, eyes distant. She might as well be a million miles away, for all he’s able to reach her. “You’ll see.”

“You can’t go,” Frank says, suddenly, so harshly it makes her flinch. “You hear me? You can’t go. I need you. But… but forget about me.” He gulps, throat raw and aching and dry as hell, like it’s full of barbs. “ _He_ needs you. You wanna protect him. You love him, so much; you always told me that. He needs you _here_ to do that. To love ‘im. I know… it’s easier to let go. Trust me, I been there. Wanted to take that out. Make it all stop hurtin’.” He shakes his head. He’s vaguely aware of tears dripping from his cheeks, blinding him. Laurel is a pale, blue blur now. “But he needs you. You’re his ma. You’re all he’s got. And it’s bad, I know it’s bad. And it hurts. You just wanna be done. But we’re gonna be all right, one day.” He holds her hand tighter, so tight he thinks he might be hurting her. “We’re gonna be all right, and he needs you to be all right. If Wes was here, he’d be tellin’ you the same thing.”

Laurel sniffles, eyes finally coming back into focus, re-centering on him. She blinks. Once, twice, owlishly. Then, finally, after the longest moment in the world, she manages a tiny nod.

“Okay,” is all she gives him, all she can muster.

That one word, again. Containing so much and so little.

Okay. He can work with that. He’ll take _okay_.

He doesn’t know how much longer it lasts. Hours. Minutes. Time is nonexistent. Time is invented anyway; it isn’t real, all arbitrary increments and numbers to try to make sense of something that _makes_ no sense. That’s human nature, he figures; trying to make sense of shit, sort it into boxes, make it feel like you can control it when really, in the end, you can’t, and he can’t control this now, control how much blood she loses, if he loses _her_. He sits there, her little hand clutched so tight in his, as the doctor and nurses work, scurrying around. He thinks, vaguely, he can hear the doctor call for more blood. Say something about how she’s hemorrhaging, losing too much. He hears, and somehow he doesn’t. All he can see is Laurel, her head and shoulders and arms, the rest of her swallowed up in a sea of blue.

Frank always thought hell would be red. Fire. But hell is blue. Hell is _here_.

Movement, suddenly. A spike of it, abruptly, coming out of nowhere, and a crescendo of voices. He glances over, sitting up slightly to raise his head over the sheet blocking his view – and that’s when he sees it.

Him.

The baby, being gently yanked free, his tiny pink body covered in blood and flecks of white and God knows what else. His arms are outstretched, features puckered into what Frank imagines is a look of indignance, at being so unceremoniously torn from his happy home. Squirming and small – so unbelievably small that Frank isn’t sure for a moment if he’s really real or not. It’s an admittedly gory sight. It doesn’t look beautiful or miraculous by any means.

But it _is_. It is, and _he_ is.

“He’s out,” Frank tells her, leaning in close. Waiting for the inevitable first screech, first cry. First sound to meet his ears. “They got him out.”

“Why…” Her voice is a croak. She furrows her brow, glancing around the room, craning her neck unsuccessfully to peer over the sheet. “Why isn’t he crying?”

They get him free, finally, and immediately there’s another flurry of motion; of nurses rushing him over to a little bed and laying him there, before they even offer to let her hold him. It’s too much at once for Frank to realize what’s going on, for a while – until he locks eyes with the doctor, briefly, and sees a face fraught with worry, lips pinched into a frown.

“He’s in respiratory distress,” someone says; a doctor, a nurse. It doesn’t matter. “Get him to the NICU, stat.”

It feels like a blunderbuss has been fired straight into his gaping chest, spewing shards of glass and metal and jagged shrapnel into his lungs, his heart. He freezes, but then Laurel is squeezing his hand, tugging on it then tugging on the front of his scrubs, murmuring something so quiet he can’t make it out through all the noise. He has to lean in close to hear her.

“What’s wrong with him?” she croaks, a weak sob slipping past her lips. So small and broken he feels his breastbone split clean down the middle. “W-why isn’t he crying? Frank, why-”

He doesn’t answer. Can’t find it in him. He doesn’t think his voice exists, anymore; it’s been stolen. Stolen by the same silence that muffled her son’s cries. Stolen by death.

No. No, no, no. He won’t believe that. No fucking way is he believing that.

“Sure he’s fine,” he says, watching with sickness festering in his stomach as they cart the baby off down some hallway, away from Laurel. Without his mother. Cold and not crying and maybe not breathing either, and so scared. “He, uh… I’m sure he…”

 _He’ll be fine_. He can’t manage it. He doesn’t want to make her false promises anymore, give her misplaced hope where there is none. Maybe he was wrong, and she was right, and this was fated to happen from the start, after the smoke and fire and all those months she’d spent grieving Wes. Maybe it’d all poisoned her bloodstream. Poisoned him.

Maybe it’s like she said. He’d never had a chance.

“I wanna hold him,” she insists, but her voice is softer now. Eyes wide and bleeding panic, like she’s bleeding all over the sheets. Bleeding out. Slit wrists. Stabbed stomach. Dying, in front of him. “He can’t… they can’t take him away like that-”

The doctor is calling for more units of blood, now. There’s an edge in his voice that betrays his panic. Things are speeding up around them, into a whirlwind, a cyclone of nurses and voices and beeping and blue. Beeping. Slower, gradually slower. He realizes, with a start, that that’s _Laurel’s_ heartbeat, and her eyes are threatening to close again, her breath hitching. Too much. It’s too much at once and Frank wants to clamp his hands over his ears and hunker down in the corner and hide, run, but he can’t. Won’t.

“She’s hemorrhaging,” the doctor booms at a group of nurses, who scatter like spooked rats. “Get me that blood _now_.”

Frank turns to her, opens his mouth to say something, but she beats him to it, managing to lock her eyes on his long enough to rasp, “Go with him.”

“No,” he blurts out, shaking his head. His throat and belly feel impossibly heavy, his panic collecting there like chunks of lead. “No, I’m not leavin’ you. No way.”

He made a promise, once. Promised never to leave her. He left her, once. He can’t do it again. She can’t ask him to do it now.

Not now – God, not _now_.

“Please,” she croaks, growing paler by the second, so pale he swears he can see the veins in her face draining before his very eyes, leaving her skin white as ivory. The light in her eyes, those huge pools of blue, is dimming. Fading to grey. “ _Please_ , I don’t want him to be alone.”

Frank’s realizes then, like a punch in the gut, how fucking selfish he is. Wanting to stay with Laurel. Needing to see her to make _himself_ feel better when her son is down in some sterile, frigid hallway, in the arms of strangers, scared and alone. This isn’t about him, what he wants. This is about where he needs to be.

Where _she_ needs him to be.

He kisses her, before he stands. Presses his lips to her forehead and feeling his tears spilling onto her skin. Tries, stupidly, irrationally, to make some of his strength, his lifeforce flow into her. He doesn’t care if it kills him; he’d give his life for hers. Drain every drop of blood in his body to sustain her. Rip the breath from his lungs for her son.

This boy who isn’t his. Who he loves so desperately nonetheless.

“Go,” she says again, louder this time, more insistent. And it kills him, cages his heart in barbed wire. But he does.

 

~

 

The NICU, then.

It’s a sterile, unfriendly little place, even though one would think rows upon rows of babies are a very friendly sight indeed. But these are the sickly children, ones in incubators like little pods. Like something out of a sci-fi movie where humans are cryogenically frozen. Frank can’t shake how odd it looks, all those babies lined up, looking like tiny robots with all their wires and tubes and monitors, barely human.

So small. Only just barely arriving into this world, and already seeing how cruel it can be.

Finally, the nurse leading him comes to a stop before one of the peculiar baby-pods, and nods down at it, a smile brightening her features, almost blinding him in his exhausted state.

“There he is. Baby…?”

She flips through her clipboard, gnawing on her lip. Frank answers, before she has the chance to find the name. “Castillo.”

Baby Castillo. Laurel has given everything to this child, every scrap of strength left in her. She could lay dying, upstairs, bleeding out for him. He should wear her name proudly.

“Baby Castillo,” she echoes, nodding. “Well, the little guy’s doing better, now. He’s stabilized. His lungs were underdeveloped, and he had respiratory distress syndrome, so we’ve hooked him up to a ventilator. He should start learning to breathe, be able to do it on his own, soon. He’s on fluids. Hooked up to a feeding tube. He’s small, too; only weighs three and a half pounds. I know it looks bad. But it isn’t.” She pauses, giving him another, earnest smile. “He’ll be in here, for a few weeks, until he can eat and breathe and stay warm on his own. But he’s well on his way. And I’m sure he’ll be glad his dad is here to keep him company.”

 _I’m not his dad_ , Frank almost says, the words bubbling up in his throat. That impulse, to distance himself, not use that word because it’s not what he is, not what he deserves to be.

But he’s not sure that statement is entirely accurate, anymore. So he just nods.

The nurse gives him one last look, and leaves him with that, and only then does Frank finally allow himself to look at the baby, nestled there on a little bed patterned with polka dots. He’d kept his eyes off of it before, afraid he wouldn’t be able to hear anything the nurse was saying if he did, and when he first lays eyes on him, he knows he would’ve been right.

Nothing else exists, when he sees him. Nothing in the world.

He’s never seen something so small. He’s smaller even than a doll. He barely looks real. His skin is a half-shade lighter than caramel; lighter than Wes’s but darker than Laurel’s, and puckered, wrinkled, ever so slightly pinkened. He has a light dusting of dark hair on his head. His fingers and toes are the smallest things he thinks he’s ever seen; so fragile. His eyes aren’t open. His arms and legs are skinny, almost worryingly so, thin as sticks, bones rubbery and curved as if barely formed. _Everything_ about him is worrying; from all the tubes leading in and out of him, wires, ventilator, to the stuttering rise and fall of his chest. This isn’t what Frank had imagined he’d look like, during all their secret late-night conversations while Laurel had been asleep. He’d pictured him coming out strong and chubby and screaming, just as strong as he’d seemed.

He doesn’t look strong now.

Frank thinks he might be crying; he’s too tired to know for sure. He sinks down into a chair next to the incubator and releases all the breath in his body, brushing a hand over his beard, shaking. He has no idea what’s happening to Laurel. If Laurel is even still alive.

What would happen to her son if Laurel _doesn’t_ live. What he would do.

Selfish. He’s being fucking selfish again, like he always is. This isn’t about him. This is so far from about him that it’s almost laughable. He sees him – Laurel’s son, not his – and even though he’s weak, and his eyes aren’t open, and he can’t cry, he loves him; a hopeless, desperate, unconditional kind of love he’s never felt for anyone before. He falls so hard so fast, like he’d fallen for Laurel. Fallen for this boy’s mother, in precisely the same mystifying way.

And he isn’t his, not by blood. And who gives a fuck if he isn’t. He loves him. Irrationally. Beyond all sense. With every atom and cell in him. How could he not love someone who is a part of Laurel.

Who _she_ loves so much already.

He’s acutely aware, for the millionth time all these months, like a sucker punch in the gut, that he doesn’t belong here. It shouldn’t be him at this baby’s bedside, watching him with all the fascination of a new father, tears in his eyes, shaky from worry and exhaustion. It should be Wes. The world is off. This is wrong.

But he is. He _is_ here. Laurel asked him to be here. There’s no changing that, no righting the past, and Frank has never believed in ghosts but he swears he can feel one by his side, right then, watching over his son with all the love in the world. The man who helped create this tiny boy, this peacefully sleeping creature. The man he owes more than he can ever say. Laurel’s ghost – but now, in a way, so many ways, _his_ ghost too.

He shouldn’t be here. He’s bad, rotten to the core. He’s done awful things. He’ll only ever fuck this up in every conceivable way this _can_ be fucked up.

But he has to try. That ghost is looking over his shoulder, standing firm. Telling him he has to try.

And he will.

There’re holes in the incubator, Frank notices, with a start. Holes he thinks are probably for arms, so he nurses can reach in, and at first he hesitates to do the same, terrified he’ll knock some crucial tube loose, ruin everything, kill him. But eventually, even though his hand is large and cumbersome and unwieldy, he maneuvers it inside, past multi-colored wires and tubes, to hold his hand.

The world stops, when he does. Shifts, and changes, on some distant, cosmic level he’ll never be able to comprehend. Stops on its axis and starts, perhaps, to spin a whole other way, in reverse. His hand dwarfs the baby’s diminutive, pruned fingers. He feels so tired, chest aching from crying, eyes burning, throat raw – but he touches him then, and knows he has to be strong, give him whatever strength he can muster up. He’s never been strong, but he can be, for them. He loves them, him and her, both of them, so desperately.

He gave up trying to understand loving Laurel long ago. No point in doing the same for her son, now.

“Hey,” he manages through his tears, sniffing. He knows he probably can’t hear, but knows he has to talk nonetheless, if only to fill this unbearable silence. “Hey, ‘member me, little man? We, uh… we used to talk, all the time. I’m Frank. Or… Uncle Frank.” He gulps, mustering a smile. “Still don’t know what I am, exactly. Your ma still hasn’t clued me in. I ever find out, though? You’ll be the first to know.”

A moment passes, in silence. The baby’s heart monitor beeps, steady, and he watches with fascination as the green sine-wave traces up and down, up and down.

“We weren’t expectin’ you so soon. Guess you just wanted out of there, huh? See the world? You gotta stay in here, for a while, though. Dunno how long. I know you’d rather be with your ma.” Laurel. God, Laurel, he still hasn’t heard about Laurel. He feels his stomach tie itself into knots, but chokes down the bile in his throat, keeps going. “You’ll be with her soon. She wants to be with you too. So get strong, okay? I’m here, for now. You ‘n me, right now… We’re all we got.”

Frank drifts off, staring for a moment at where the baby’s hand rests delicately on his index finger. Feeling him. He needs him to feel him, feel someone’s skin in this room of frigid metal and plastic, and that’s all he knows. All that matters.

“And keep breathin’,” he tells him, finally. “All we can do is keep breathin’, bud.”

 

~

 

It’s either very late at night or very early in the morning when he comes back to her.

Frank doesn’t know which. He stopped trying to figure out which hours ago, huddled in the freezing cold NICU, eyes bloodshot from exhaustion and crying, edges of his vision going blurry. There had only been one window; very small and very high up and very far away, and in his state he couldn’t tell night from day. He can’t, now, either, barely conscious as he is.

She’s alive. The words get him up the stairs. Get him to haul his sorry ass to his feet and stumble into the elevator. She’s alive. She’s stable.

He hears them like a mantra. Like his own heartbeat. _She’s alive. Alive. Alive. Alive._

He is, too.

He goes to her. He debates leaving the baby for a long time, knows he shouldn’t and knows she might not want him to. He can hardly stand the idea of him being alone – but he can hardly stand the idea of _her_ being alone, either, so he goes.

She’s asleep, when he ducks into her room, all tranquil pastel blue walls and tile flooring, a large window letting in the light of the young dawn. It’s early in the morning, the light teetering between grey and gold, just beginning to change to the latter and spill into the room. Laurel is still, lying up in bed with her eyes closed, her lungs pulling air in and out, deflating and inflating her chest; a comforting, steady sight. An IV and a blood pressure monitor hooked up to her, another machine tracking her heartbeat. She looks barely alive, he thinks. Like all these months she’s been on the brink, and last night, bringing her son into the world… That was her final purpose. The only thing she needed to stay to do.

She’d seemed content to die, last night. But he’d seen the truth, buried deep in her eyes. She hadn’t really wanted to. He knows her. That’s why she’s still breathing. Why she held on. Why she’ll always hold on.

He’s not sure how he makes his way over to the chair at her bedside, but somehow he does, staggering over on unsteady legs, hair and eyes wild, body shaky with too many emotions at once to properly process. It’s overloading his systems. Shutting him down. He’d been so afraid, last night. He’d also fallen so in love. With the baby – and, in a way, with Laurel, all over again. He feels half-dead. He probably looks it, too. Half-dead on the outside and never so alive on the inside.

They’re _both_ alive.

He sits, for a while. Maybe an hour or two, before Laurel begins to stir. She’s still pale, ghost-white, paler than he’s ever seen a human look, but when she peels open her eyes slowly, gradually, and notices him there, they flood with recognition and color. And he knows she’s okay, just looking into those eyes as the sun widens into beams across her body, twirling in her hair, illuminating her. She’s _okay_. They did get _okay_ in the end, and maybe, just maybe, they’re on their way to _better_ now.

A first step. Or maybe not even that. Maybe just the possibility of a first step.

He blinks, once, twice, not sure if he’s imagining her waking, then finally smiles and reaches out, taking her hand, kissing the back of it. “Hey.”

“Where is he?” she croaks, voice hoarse. She looks too weak to move, almost. She can only barely lift her head. “Where-”

“NICU,” he answers. “He’s doin’ good. They got him stable. He’s gonna be fine.”

She should look happy, but suddenly something else flashes across her features. Something else darkens in her eyes and it’s not happiness, not relief, not even close.

“He’s in there…” she chokes out, guilt washing over her. “He’s in there because of me.”

He shakes his head, moves closer. “No. No, he’s not, you didn’t do anything to him-”

“I did.” She’s silent for a moment, raising her eyes to the ceiling, as if to keep the tears from escaping. “I tried to protect him. But before I knew… I was drinking, all the time. And the smoke. That night. It hurt him.” She gulps visibly. “ _I_ hurt him.”

“That’s-”

“I was supposed to keep him safe. All I had to do… And I didn’t,” she continues, voice tightening. “I went over to Annalise’s… God, I was just so _mad_. I’ve just been so mad, all this time. I knew… it’d be bad for him. I knew what it’d do to him. I-I didn’t know how to stop.” She lowers her eyes, shrinking away from him. “I tried. I tried so hard.”

He gulps. “Laurel…”

“You said I can do this. But you’re wrong,” she remarks, morose. “You’re always wrong.”

 _I’m not_ , he wants to say. _Wasn’t wrong about you making it. Wasn’t wrong about him making it either._

He may not be smart, he’ll admit that. But he isn’t always wrong.

“You didn’t screw him up, Laurel, you didn’t do anything,” he tells her, firm, loud enough to catch her attention. “So he came a little too soon. That wasn’t on you, wasn’t on anybody. It’s not gonna hurt him. He’s… he’s little, yeah. He’s so tiny. Never saw anyone so small. But he’s gonna be okay, docs said. Just needs time. Needs to learn how to breathe, keep himself warm. And he will. I know he will.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t even hold him. I can’t… I can’t be with him. That’s all I’m supposed to do.”

Frank knows she’s right; she can’t be with him. Won’t be able to, probably, for days. She’s lost God knows how much blood, nearly died. She can’t be with him when she needs to be and he can see she believes, so staunchly, that that already means she’s a failure as a mother, that she’s already fucked up and done irreparable harm. Frank doesn’t know how to make her believe otherwise. He’s not sure he can.

“I’ll stay with him,” he’s promising almost before he realizes the words are coming out of his mouth. He squeezes her hand, and finally, she drags her eyes up to meet his. “Okay? Promise I will. He’s not gonna be alone.”

A moment passes, in silence. Laurel calms herself somewhat and perks up, glancing down at him.

“What, um… what does he look like?”

“He’s, uh… He’s small. Three and a half pounds,” he begins, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “Smallest thing I ever saw. Got dark hair. Hasn’t opened his eyes yet, though. They, um… got him on all sorts of machines. Looks like a tiny robot baby, kinda. I held his hand. He had… the tiniest little fingers, you wouldn’t believe it. Got all ten of ‘em, all his toes. He’s perfect. Think he looks like you, a lot.” He chances a grin. Laurel listens, captivated. “Talked to him, some. Don’t know if he heard or not. Said I was Uncle Frank. Told him you love ‘im. Told him… we both do. He knows you’ll be there soon. Soon as you can.”

Laurel is silent, taking all of that in. She looks as weary as he feels, probably even more so. Eventually, finally, she seems to make a decision, something snapping into place behind her eyes, and she looks up at him again.

“Go to him,” she rasps, softly, and he frowns.

“I just… I just got here. I can stay for a-”

“Go be with him,” Laurel cuts him off, insistent. The matter’s been decided, he can see. He doesn’t get a say. “He needs you.”

“I don’t-” His voice catches in his throat. His hold on her hand tightens, subconsciously. “I don’t wanna leave you.”

Finally, Laurel smiles; a sad, rueful little smile. But she doesn’t waver. She knows what she wants – and he sees it, then, in her eyes, in her determination. How great a mother she will be.  How great a mother she already _is_. The sheer, incomprehensible _strength_ of everything in her, contained beneath her skin.

“I know you don’t.”

He loves her so much he can’t breathe, so much that the words, that declaration, is swirling around in his chest cavity, choking his lungs, begging to escape. He loves her so much. He’s never loved her more than he does, right then, and the thought of leaving her again kills him – but he can’t say no.

She’s putting her son in his hands. Trusting him with her world. He can’t deny her this. Could never deny her anything.

So Frank stands, almost mechanical in his exhaustion, and bends down, pressing a kiss to her forehead, feeling the warmth of her skin, the reality of her breathing. Imagining the flutter of her pulse. She’s okay. Now that he knows that, he can go.

“I’ll be back,” he promises, against her brow. And again, faithfully, he goes. It’s all he can do, now. For Laurel. For Wes.

He goes in their stead. He goes for the both of them.


	10. X

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah. I changed the title right before the last chap because the last one wasn’t doing it for me. New title. Same fic. 
> 
> In case you missed it, the playlist for this is [here](http://8tracks.com/aghamora1/stay-alive). But if you don’t wanna fuck with 8tracks, for a soundtrack, listen to Stay Alive by Jose Gonzalez for this chap. I don’t usually rec music for fics but that song actually ties this whole thing together in a really poignant way just words alone can’t. 
> 
> Lastly, thanks for reading! I’m particularly proud of this fic and I hope you guys have enjoyed it, and for the last time… onnnn we gooooo.

It’s a crisp, gold morning in June when he finally comes home.

“You got him?” Frank asks, trailing behind her inside the door with a duffle bag clutched in one hand, a worried frown fixed on his lips.

Laurel nods, doesn’t turn. He thinks he hears her scoff. “I’m not gonna drop him, Frank.”

“I know,” he replies, dropping the bag and hovering over her as she makes her way into her bedroom, the baby cradled in her arms. “Just checkin’.”

It’s a sluggish, cautious procession, the three of them from the front door to the bedroom. Laurel walks slowly, pace creeping, feet sweeping across the carpet in circles as she rocks the child nestled against her. Eventually she makes her way into the next room, crossing that threshold, and lays him down in his crib like he might as well be made of glass, like she’s able to fracture or shatter his tiny bones at any second. She seems hesitant to let go, even after he’s down; her hands linger around him, skin on skin, as if she’s scared to stop touching him, let him think he’s alone. At last, however, she does, backing off and resting her hands on the side of the crib, fingers hooking around the pale yellow slats.

“There we go,” she murmurs, voice a lilting coo, in that new fluttery register she’s only begun to use while talking to him; the voice she reverses for him alone. “You’re home, Christopher. You’re finally… finally here.”

Frank comes to a stop by her side, eyes falling down into the crib where he lets them linger, for a long while, at the tiny body there. At the baby’s tawny skin, dark downy hair coming in thicker by the day. At his cupid’s bow dimple, his tiny rosebud lips and pink gums that will one day soon start sprouting teeth. At his honey-brown eyes, gleaming with that sort of silent, age-old wisdom only new babies seem to possess; wisdom and perceptiveness so much like Laurel already it stops his heart, sometimes, to see. He searches his eyes, for a while – and it unsettles Frank to be stared at like that, has since the baby first opened his eyes in the NICU, in that little pod that’d been his home for his first few weeks of life. All that innocence and wide-eyed wonder looking up at him, not having a clue what he’s done, the monster he is; only seeing him for him. For the good in him, however little there may be.

He’d been the first sight Laurel’s son ever saw, in this world. And the magnitude of that responsibility isn’t lost on Frank.

He chances a surreptitious look sideways at Laurel, then. Lets his eyes linger on her too. Drinking in the sight of her feels like water, like such unimaginable relief; seeing her standing up and walking, a hint of color in her cheeks. Seeing her healthy. She’d been in a bad state, for weeks after Christopher was born. Really bad – not entirely from the blood loss and surgery and infection that’d followed, but from the inability to see her son, hold him. From feeling like she’d failed him already, with a dead father and an absentee mother. But that fear, that anxiety, all that had melted away the first time she’d held him; still tiny, weighing barely four pounds, still not breathing or eating on his own, but getting better.

Things _are_ better now. She’s better now.

Frank hadn’t belonged in that equation, in this family picture; still doesn’t, maybe. But he’d like to think he’s better now too.

She looks so tired, so world-weary, her whole body sagging under the weight of her fatigue, crumpling in on itself. The C-section and recovery had taken a toll on her body, made her even frailer than she’d been before, and the emotional toll of Christopher’s weeks in the NICU hadn’t helped, either. The hollows of her cheekbones are more prominent again, sharper, like they’d been right after the fire, before her pregnancy and the subsequent weight she’d gained because of it had filled them in. Her skin looks almost sallow in the pale gold sun, streaming in through the window by the crib and pouring over her like rain, illuminating little dust specks in the air around them.

But her eyes… Her eyes are glittering sapphires. She’s beaming with love for the baby lying there in his pastel green footie pajamas, kicking his legs around, as if still learning how to use them, testing them out, experimenting with his new limbs and all this new space around him. She’s sopping up the sunlight like a sponge and it’s pouring out of her eyes, and her hair is glowing, and she’s shimmering, all gilded, all gorgeous. She looks happy; now that he’s home from the hospital, now that they can both finally breathe. And he hasn’t seen her happy in so long. Truly happy.

And he loves her. It’s the creed that sustains him, the only doctrine he’s ever really believed in. It beats silent in his chest. His heartbeat is the only tangible declaration; he won’t say it aloud, not now. Not in this moment.

Soon. But not now.

“Sleep for a while,” he suggests, tearing Laurel from her thoughts. “I’ll watch him.”

She shakes her head. “No, you go ahead. I don’t wanna leave him yet.”

She’s not leaving him; not physically, at least. At most she’ll only be a few feet away on the bed, close enough to be at his side in seconds if she needed to – but that isn’t what she means, and he knows it. So Frank nods, head and body heavy, exhaustion rolling over him thick as billows of fog, and makes his way over to the bed, falling onto it without bothering to change out of his jeans and shirt.

He catches sight of something in her eyes, just as he goes. Fear creeping in, dark behind her eyes, eating up the blue skies of her irises and turning them an ominous grey. But he doesn’t remark on it; he’s too tired to find his voice, and Laurel doesn’t seem inclined to say anything about the subject.

Frank dozes, for a while. He doesn’t know how long, but his body switches off in seconds, and he thinks he hadn’t realized how tired he truly was, after weeks in the hospital. After that first week alternating between the NICU with Christopher and Laurel’s room, too scared to let himself drift off for long in either place. Like one day he’d wake up and they’d have slipped away in his absence, death skulking in when he hadn’t been there to protect them from it. It’d felt like watching them was the only true way to keep them safe, regardless of all the doctors and nurses and machines monitoring their vitals – and he understands Laurel’s need to stay up. He does. Especially after she hadn’t been able to be with him for so long; hadn’t even seen him at all but for the pictures and videos Frank had taken to show her.

She’s compensating, for all that lost time. Trying to make up for it however she can. He understands.

He wakes up a while later, rolling over on the bed, finding Laurel still standing over the crib just like he’d left her. As far as he can tell she hasn’t moved an inch, and he frowns, sitting up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

“Laurel?”

She turns her head back, ever so slightly, to look at him, and when he does he sees that familiar distance in her eyes – and he knows who’s standing beside her then; that silent, loyal sentinel, the ghost walking always at her side. It feels wrong, to intrude on this moment – on this family he hasn’t have a place in. For a moment he feels overwhelming guilt, for disrupting her. He doesn’t belong there, with the three of them, father and son and mother and ghost.

He shouldn’t be here. But he is. And Laurel smiles at him, then, the distance in her eyes thawing, and he relaxes immediately.

“How long was I out?” he grunts, rising to stand, taking his place back at her side.

She shrugs. “Hour or so. Thought you’d sleep longer.”

The ghost isn’t gone; that much is plain to see in her demeanor, in the hollowness of her voice, that tonality you get whilst deep in thought, trapped halfway between this world and a memory in another. But she isn’t giving Frank the impression that he chased Wes away, that he took his place. No – it’s as if he’s simply moved over.

Made room for him here, too.

They’re silent, for a moment, and there’s no particular burden to fill it. It feels right, somehow. Silence has always been Laurel’s resting state; for all those years, locked away behind bars alone, it was Frank’s, too. They occupy it with ease, and it flows over them smooth and easy like a tide, and when Laurel finally opens her mouth it feels like it’s come to its natural end, drawn to a close and receded.

“He looks like him already,” she observes, softly. “More every day.”

 _Him_. Wes. Laurel still seems reluctant to use his name, sometimes, and Frank isn’t exactly sure why; because it’s too painful, maybe, and using that pronoun fosters a certain degree of detachment. She’s never really had time to mourn Wes, properly; those first few awful months had been comprised of seemingly endless surgeries and pain and hospital stays, and after that all she’d cared about was finding his killer, her quest for vengeance. Then Christopher had come, far too soon, crashing in on them like a comet and realigning their worlds. She’s never been allowed time to grieve. To put that ghost to rest.

But he’s alive, still. So very much alive, in the tiny child slumbering before them; his blood in his veins. There’s no putting that ghost to rest, when Laurel will be staring into it’s eyes every day for the rest of her life, and so will he. There’s no putting it to rest. Putting _him_ to rest. Frank doesn’t want to, and he knows they shouldn’t. For the sake of Christopher. For his son.

There’s something to be said for letting go. But sometimes there’s just as much to be said for holding on.

“He does,” Frank murmurs, not knowing what else to say. She’s right. She’s always right.

“He’s gonna look just like him,” she continues, voice strained, now. “I can tell.”

Frank places his hand on the small of her back, drawing her closer. “Laurel…”

She sniffs. “He should… he should be here.”

“He is,” Frank remarks, lowly. Laurel looks at him, surprised, but he doesn’t waver, doesn’t doubt himself. “He’s here.” _I can feel him. I know._

“I’m just…” She drifts off, swiping the tears off her cheeks. “I’m just scared. That I’m gonna forget him, one day. Forget what he was like. I know it’s gonna happen. I don’t _want_ it to happen.”

“So you won’t let it,” he tells her, angling his body toward her. “We’ll tell him about him, when he’s older. Everythin’ we know. Tell him stories. All we got.”

“And you think that’ll be enough?”

 _Enough._ Enough, to make up for Wes not being here. To make up for his loss, untimely, so cruel. No, their stories and anecdotes won’t be enough to rectify it, and they both know that. There’s no making up for that, no righting that wrong.

“No,” Frank says, earnest, voice dripping with sincerity. He moves in closer, and Laurel tucks herself against him out of instinct, her body seeking the warmth of his. “But it’ll be somethin’.”

Silence, again. Frank lets his eyes drift out the window, down to the street below, baked in sunlight like the room around them, gold and glowing. The sun shines overhead in a cloudless, cornflower blue sky, and it seems like it’s been so long since Frank has seen the sun, really _seen_ it. These months, the months before had been hell; a lonely, dark spiral. And he isn’t redeemed. He can’t be saved; Laurel knows there’s no use in trying to save him, and he doesn’t want her to.

Forget salvation, redemption. They’re empty words. Meaningless. Trivial. He doesn’t need them. He just needs _her._

And him, now. Little Christopher, her son; this strange new third party in their lives. Things will never be the same, but as long as he loves Laurel her son comes as part of that package, and he doesn’t mind; he’s so in love with the tiny boy already, bonded by those endless days in the NICU with him, holding him. Trying to talk to him. Give him _normal_. Give him _okay_ , even if he knows he may never have it himself.

He loves him. Hopelessly. He isn’t his son, and he knows that, and that barely matters at all. Flesh and blood is coincidental. There’s nothing haphazard or random about choice.

But this has never been his choice to make.

“You’re still here,” Laurel murmurs, words a sleepy drawl, like she’s only just realized it. She gives him a tired grin, the corners of her eyes crinkling, but it evaporates quickly and gives way to a troubled look. “All these months… Anyone else would’ve left. But you stayed.” She pauses. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“’Course I did,” he answers without thinking, brow furrowed, so genuinely bewildered how Laurel could ever think he would voluntarily choose to be anywhere other than by her side.

“He’s not yours, Frank,” she tells him, straight-faced, though there’s a hint of doubt in her eyes, a flicker of something he can’t identify. “He’s never… gonna be yours.”

He frowns, moving in closer to her. “You know that doesn’t matter to me.”

“It has to.”

“It _doesn’t_ ,” he urges, voice low but words emphatic. It catches her attention, makes her go still. “He’s yours, Laurel. And… and I love you.” He pauses, cursing his stumbling, clumsy words; words he can never seem to string together right, no matter how hard he tries. He’s so bad with them but he has so much to say. He knows he has to try. “I love him ‘cause he’s a part of you. Don’t need no other reason. I loved him before. Before he came, even.” She looks up at that, surprised. “I think I knew, first time I saw that ultrasound at the hospital, that picture. Used to stay up late and talk to him, at night, when you were asleep. So I love him, Laurel.” He gulps, lowering his eyes, inexplicably timid, all at once. “I love him, much as I love you.”

 _I love you_. The words hang heavy in the air between them, as they fall silent. Laurel still hasn’t said them back. She doesn’t seem like she’s about to now, either – and he doesn’t mind.

He just wants her to know. That’s all.

“I can…” She exhales sharply, shaking her head. “I can do this alone.”

Do it alone. Raise her son alone. Yes, he knows, she could. It’d be hard, juggling school and a baby with no partner, no help; damn near impossible, but she’d find a way. She always does. She doesn’t need him here and she never has. Him being here was never his choice to begin with; it’s always been hers, her decision to allow him back into her life, and now, to allow him into her son’s life. She might decide, right this instant, that she _doesn’t_ want him there. That’s he’s no good for her. No good for her son. She wouldn’t be wrong.

But she doesn’t. She just goes quiet, evading his gaze, and he inches closer, until she’s nearly tucked into his chest, surrounded by him.

“I know that,” he undertones, gently. “No one knows that more than me. But you don’t have to.”

She looks doubtful. “Frank-”

“Look, I’m not askin’ to be his dad – that’s not my place. I know that. And I’m not… askin’ to be anything you don’t want me to be.”

“I’m not ready,” Laurel cuts him off. “For us to… _be_ anything, again.”

“I’m not askin’ for us to be anythin’, either.” He gives her a tentative little grin. “I’m just… I’m just askin’ to be _here_.”

A beat.

Then-

“Okay.”

She says it with a tiniest of nods, barely perceptible at all. That same single word, too succinct for all the multitudes it contains, all that promise, all that possibility. There are no guarantees in this life, Frank knows. This is still very much a month-to-month lease she’s granting him, and it could be over at any time, if she sees fit to end it. But her eyes betray understanding, suddenly. Acknowledging the fact that he’s in this for the long haul, and maybe the tiniest hint of belief, finally, that he means it. It’s not much – but it’s something.

To him, these days, something is _so much_.

Laurel angles herself toward him as well after a moment, leaning in against his chest, and finally tucking her head underneath his chin with a sigh, nuzzling his neck. She hasn’t done anything like this in so long, so sweet and soft, so loving. Like maybe she still harbors those feelings she’d had for him in another life. Like maybe part of her loves him too, though she’s never said the words.

She’s a different woman now than she was then, before the fire, before all that hurt and pain and suffering. In many ways he’s a different man. But in equally many ways she’s still the Laurel he met so long ago, the fearless, odd girl who had looked him straight in the eyes and called him an ass the first time they’d ever met. In equally many ways he’s still that man, though he’s been battered and broken to bits, and he no longer knows himself sometimes.

And things aren’t perfect. Things will never be perfect. There’s still Lila and Wallace Mahoney and Bonnie’s father and all that blood on his hands. There are still those violent flickering thoughts, those dreams, and maybe they’ll never entirely go away.

But they’re only thoughts. Only dreams. They’re not real and they can’t hurt anyone, and they don’t matter in the end.

Frank feels the heat of her breath, the softness of the brush of her nose, the sheer, overwhelming physical reality of her body pressed against him – and that’s real. So is Christopher, who makes a fussy, hiccupping sob indicative of an oncoming round of wailing, as if enraged that Laurel is paying attention to someone other than him. And when Frank lifts him into his arms he feels that soothing, perfect weight of him – and that’s real.

He passes him off to Laurel, who cradles the baby in her scarred arm, fingers now just as nimble and dexterous as they’d been before, shushing him, singing a sweet, lilting Spanish lullaby that flows from her throat like warm honey. And she huddles up close to him once more, resting her head lightly on her shoulder. Smiling. And that’s real, too.

He shouldn’t be here, but he is. _They_ are. Together.

That’s real, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://laurelcasfillo.tumblr.com/)!


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